Today I would like to share something Fishbowl Solutions has been working on internally for a little while now and started to implement at customer sites – Fishbowl Multi-Upload and Batch Metadata Editor.
This component was initially developed as part of Fishbowl’s Innovation Event. The combination of the first place and second place idea meshed very well together in delivering a seamless method for bulk contributing and editing metadata. This is now within production at a customer site with several modifications made to satisfy their requirements.
The main use case for this component is the mass uploading of content to get it into the system for categorization now, or at a later time. Providing a staging ground for content to get it in the system and off the user’s desktop is crucial for an enterprise solution. In addition, the mass tagging and editing of metadata all at once is a feature that has been missing within content server from its inception. As many of you know, Bex Huff of Bezzotech has a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet (Remote Metadata Updater) that uses SOAP calls to communicate with content server to perform edits to content’s metadata after a search query is performed. My goal was extend this functionality within Oracle WebCenter Content using modern-day advancements in JavaScript and browser capabilities.
This was done using a combination of several API’s, PlupLoad (Oracle uses an older version of this for their Drag & Drop upload feature within WebCenter Spaces Document Explorer Taskflow), Handsontable, JQuery, (in addition to extensively utilizing my WebCenter Content and Jquery Framework for calling WebCenter Content services) and Fishbowl’s overall knowledge of WebCenter and web development techniques.
The most compelling feature that was added for this deployment is “Profile Awareness”. By this I mean all aspects of the profile and rules set up within content server are taken into consideration. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Metadata field state (hidden, edit, info only, required, excluded)
- Custom field labels
- Standard list and profile restricted lists for drop down lists
- Date selection
- Default values for profiles
- Metadata field ordering if rule is set as a group
Here are several screenshots of the features and use case it provides (click on any of them to see actual sizes):
- A user had several images to upload and know they will go within a certain profile. Navigate to the upload page and drag and drop the files into the drop area:
- All of the items are now checked into the content server into a private workspace for that user. Within the workspace you can filter by keywords uploaded and categorize content by profile. (Note: You can also tag content without profiles as well).
- As there are bound to be erroneous uploads of duplicates, or extra files, supporting a delete function was crucial.
- The user is now ready to check the boxes for the items they want to categories and tag with final metadata. Here we present the user with a spreadsheet within the browser. This is built using the Handsontable JQuery plugin which supports common Excel like features; copy / paste, undo, and cell dragging. UCM is integrated to provide a high level of context while editing this data; Dropdowns, date fields, required fields, and info only fields aid in user tagging.
- With column support for dropdowns and dates.
- Once the user is done editing, they can execute an update. The table will provide feedback in real time as each item is updated. The result of the update will be relayed to the user via row highlighting and an error / exception table informing them of the failure.
This expands upon the use case of updating content already in the system with the spreadsheet (Note: That use case is still supported, however, locked down to administrators only).
I hope you find this post compelling about the power that Fishbowl can provide by combining ideas from an innovation event with the years of experience Fishbowl has within the WebCenter Content (UCM) world to provide ease of contribution and bulk editing of content. For more information, feel free to reach out to us at 952-465-3400 or [email protected].
Thanks,
AJ LaVenture
Senior Software Consultant
