Aspects for metadata templates

[hsjawanda]

Hi,

I am planning to have "metadata templates" for assets.  The idea is that the user selects a template from a "modify asset" kind of page, and is presented with metadata (property) fields to fill out – of course, these fields and their types are determined by the template.

I wanted to have my plan double-checked by people more knowledgeable than myself :-).

I know I can create aspects dynamically and that is how I am going to implement metadata templates (henceforth called mtemplates for convenience). This works fine while the server is up and running.  What happens when the server is restarted?  How do I make sure that aspects created during runtime are still available with the same definitions after a server restart?

Would it be do-able by writing out my dynamically created aspects to an XML file, and to configure DictionaryService to read this XML file so that the definitions would be available always?  Any other idea?

How can I create/simulate a datatype that corresponds to a drop-down list (basically, a limited set of Strings that can be chosen)?

[gavinc]

Hi,

I believe you can now edit models and save them through the UI, I'm sure Roy can shed some more light on this for you.

To get a property limited to a list of possible values you can use the "category" property type. The data dictionary and repository full supports this currently but unfortunately the UI only has limited support for it.

The forums functionality coming early next year will need to use a similar technique so support will be added soon. In the meantime the UI will allow you to select a category but you are able to browse the whole category tree rather than the required sub-tree.