Required metadata in Elvis 4 Server

Metadata can be very powerful, but only if it's available and up-to-date. Structured and relevant metadata, gathered during import, results in more relevant results and better information for the user.

To ensure that metadata is entered, users can be required to enter information into specific metadata fields, when importing files or on files already present in the system.

When metadata fields are set to required, users are:

• Notified or required to add metadata when importing files
• Notified to add metadata to assets already in the system

Loose, strict & enforced

When using required metadata you set the behavior on the server side. There are three possible settings, these are applied for the whole server:

• Loose (default): notifies and encourages users to add metadata for fields configured as required, not forcing them to do so.
• Strict: will not allow assets to be manually imported without the required metadata, import modules have no restrictions
• Enforced: will not allow assets inside Elvis without the required metadata. Use with extreme caution. This can cripple import modules and other processes in Elvis when not all required metadata is set on assets

Note: To change the default setting for the server, open the config.properties.txt in the server configuration and add the following: requiredMetadataHandling=strict

Setting a field to required

Setting metadata fields to required is done in the custom-assetinfo.xml file. You can set fields to be required for all assets, but you can also specify to set it to required for a certain asset domain or certain asset types.

Some examples:

<!-- Standard fields -->
<fieldExt name="status" group="General" requiredFor="*" />

<fieldExt name="copyright" group="Rights" requiredFor="assetType:jpg, assetType:psd" />

<fieldExt name="description" group="General" requiredFor="assetDomain:image, assetDomain:video" />

Or for a custom field:

<!-- Custom fields -->
<field name="cf_photographer" group="CompanyData" requiredFor="assetDomain:image">
    ...
</field>