Empowering your Content Delivery with Metadata
Every piece of content stored in a HARP™ project can be tagged
with metadata. A piece of metadata has a name and any number of values.
For example, you might tag a document with its language and intended
audiences. You can also mark content as being in a DRAFT state by
setting a metadata called draft to true
.
Metadata can be specified in a number of ways. It can be:
- Automatically calculated from XML content when it is added to a project.
- Manually specified using the administrative application.
- Specified at the project level. Project-level metadata is added to every file in that project.
- Derived from DITA maps. Metadata on a DITA map will be added to every topic that is part of the publication described by that map.
Once your content is tagged with metadata, you can use it to do all sorts of things.
- Filter the content from a project available through a project.
- Enable your users to dynamically filter search results using metadata values.
- Configure rendering details.
Portal Content Filtering
When you associate a project with a portal, by default all content of that project becomes available through that portal. However, you can filter the content for the portal by assigning metadata filters to that portal.
For example, imagine a system managing the documentation for
two brands, Acme and Uber. All of the documentation is stored in a
single project, with some content marked brand=acme
, and some
as brand=uber
, and yet others that apply across brands; brand={acme, uber}
. However, each brand can have its own
portal, pointing to the single project, but restricting what's available
using metadata filtering. Such an arrangement might look like this:
Search Result Filtering
When a user executes a search on a portal. HARP can provide them with the ability to filter the results using metadata types configured by the portal administrator. It also displays the number of results for the current search for each value of filterable metadata. Fore example:
Rendering Details
The web application that
controls portals can be configured to use consult a file's metadata
set when rendering it for customers to view. For example, you might
configure the portal to render content marked with draft=true
differently from other files, e.g. with a different color heading,
or even inserting the word DRAFT
into the title or as
a watermark behind the text., like so:
Filtered Publications
In some cases, the top-level publication might pass metadata filtering for a portal, but certain topics in the publication do not. In tht case the portal application can be configured either to show the filtered content in the table of contents highlighted as being unavailable, or hide them from the portal UI entirely. In either case, the filtered content will never be available; attempts to access such content will result in a message to the user indicating that the content is not available.