Field Definitions

Family

Describes the family to which the field belongs → Metadata Families

Key

• The name of the field

• The keys are case sensitive

• The Key of the top fields are unique (case insensitive)

Dotted Key

• Primary key of a field definition

• Composed by concatenating the following pieces with a dot .

  • Family

  • ParentDottedKey

  • Key

• The descriptive field Keyword has as dotted key Descriptive.Keywords.Keyword

Parent dotted key

• Foreign key reference to the dotted key of the parent

Top

• Means that the field definition has no parent and hence that the ParentDottedKey is undefined. 

• Each record consists of a list of top fields whose key is unique.

Sub / Child

• Field(s) (definitions) can be nested inside other field(s) (definitions)

• Such nested field(s) definitions are called sub or child field(s) (definitions) and have a parent field (definition). See Complex Fields.

Flattened Key

A sub field cannot be uniquely determined by its own key because the key for sub fields is not unique across all fields. By concatenating the key of the parent field(s) with the key of the sub field, you obtain a unique flattened key. For example the field Keywords with sub field Keyword, yields a flattened key KeywordsKeyword.

Lucene Key

• Name of the field in Lucene. For legacy reasons it can differ significantly from the key of the field.

• From 18.1 the REST API allows for using the field key instead of the Lucene key in queries. For sub fields you must use the flattened key. This allows for bypassing the legacy Lucene keys.

• From 19.1: the Lucene key always corresponds with the flattened key

Required 

If true, this field will always be present for every record with a non empty value.

Read Only

The value of this field cannot be changed using metadata updates.

Write Once

• Field can only be filled out once from empty to its final value

• Subsequent changes to the value are ignored

• Only allowed on top fields

22.1

Index

• If true, make the field searchable in the index

• Note: a field can be present in the index without being indexed.

Global

When using the standard search, it searches in a hidden virtual field which contains as value a join of all fields marked as global

Advanced Search

If true, make it available in the advanced search. Requires the field to be indexed.

Tokenized

Informally speaking, tokenizing means splitting the string value of the field on white space in tokens. Requires the field to be indexed.

For example the field Description with value "Alice Bob Cedric" is split into the ordered tokens "Alice", "Bob" and "Cedric".

The file can matched in the index:

• using these tokens separately: +Description:Cedric +Description:Alice

• in a specific order: +Description:"Bob Cedric"

• note: +Description:"Alice Cedric" will not match

The tokenizing goes further by additionally removing stop words (the, and, of, etc) and performing stemming (the words runs, run, running, ran all match).

Sortable

• Only field marked as sortable can be requested for sorting in the REST API

• When the field is multi valued, e.g. Descriptive.Keywords.Keyword = A, B then only the first value A will be used for the sort

• Multi valued textual fields are stored alphabetically

Type

Describe the type of the field definition → Metadata Field Types

Regex

Regular expression used to validate the value of the when saving a record. Only applies to Simple Fields.

23.4