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Creating a Metadata Scheme

The Metadata Scheme is a fundamental element of your site. You should design it with care, because once implemented, it will be difficult to change. If you need to change your Metadata scheme on a live site, please contact Sitekit support.

A sample Metadata scheme is shown below. In this example we have created a Scheme which holds just three items of data - Author, Document Owner and Date Created.

<METADATA>
<ITEM>
<NAME> Author </NAME>
<INPUTTYPE>textbox</INPUTTYPE>
<HELP> Name of Author </HELP>
</ITEM>
<ITEM>
<NAME> Document Owner </NAME>
<INPUTTYPE>textbox</INPUTTYPE>
<HELP> Owner of this article. </HELP>
</ITEM>
<ITEM>
<NAME> Date Created </NAME>
<INPUTTYPE>textbox</INPUTTYPE>
<DEFAULTVALUE>###datecreated###</DEFAULTVALUE>
<HELP> Enter in YYYY/MM/DD </HELP>
</ITEM>
</METADATA>

Schema Format

A Schema follows the format shown below. First there is the <METADATA> tag, then a list of <ITEM> tags. Inside each set of Item tags you can place other tags, (listed in Table 1 below) until finally you close the </METADATA> tag.

<METADATA>
<ITEM>
<FRIENDLYNAME>Document Title</FRIENDLYNAME>
<NAME>DC.Title</NAME>
<HELP>Some useful bit of help</HELP>
</ITEM>
<ITEM>
<NAME>DC.Title.Alternative</NAME>
<FRIENDLYNAME>Alternative Document Title</FRIENDLYNAME>
<HELP>Alternative title of document. Please only use letters
and numbers.</HELP>
<THESAURUSID>788</THESAURUSID>
</ITEM>
</METADATA>  

Table 1 shows you all the Tags that can be used in a Metadata Scheme.

 Schema Tags (Table 1)

Tag

Necessary

Possible Values             

Default 

Notes

<METADATA>

yes

encloses all items

n/a

Defines start and end of scheme

<ITEM>

yes

encloses an item

n/a

Defines start and end of an item

<NAME>

yes

(text)

(none)

Name of field

<FRIENDLYNAME>

no

(text)

(if not present then name tag used)

Friendly display name for field

<VALIDATION>

no

(text – regular expression)

(none)

e.g. <VALIDATION>^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$</VALIDATION>

<INPUTTYPE>

no

textarea, textbox, hidden, fixed

textbox

Field input type. If set to hidden or fixed then the non-editable value will always be the default value (which could contain one of the three system variables described later in this section.

<HELP>

no

(text)

(blank)

Uses acronym tag for mouseover.

<THESAURUSID>

no

(integer/text)

(none)

id or name of thesaurus to use for this field.

<THESAURUSMODE>

no

1,2,3 or 4

1

1 – pop-up thesaurus, comma delimited terms possible.

2 - pop-up thesaurus, one term only.

3 – drop-down of thesaurus terms, multple items can be selected.

4 - drop-down of thesaurus terms, single item only can be selected.

<DEFAULTVALUE>

no

(text/numeric)

(none)

Used for pre -filling field on page creation. Allows the use of some magic words.

<COMMENT>

no

(text)

(none)

Used for comments. Ignored by the system.

 

Default Values

Rather than have your editors enter all the metadata manually, you may want some values entered automatically. Sitekit provides three system variables to serve as default values:

:::creator:::
:::datecreated:::
:::format:::

These are entered in the default value tag - for example;  DEFAULTVALUE> :::DATECREATED::: </DEFAULTVALUE>

  1. Creator is taken from the “fullname” field of the logged-in user (“CMC/Users”). If the field is blank, then a blank value is returned.
  2. DateCreated will be the Date/Time when the properties/article/upload form was loaded. The date format is yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm e.g. 2010-04-30T11:22.
  3. Format will always be text/html – except for downloads, where it is left blank because Sitekit doesn't know the content type until the file is uploaded.

 

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