Hi everybody,
I'm an AEM (Sites and Guides, cloud version) user with a group of companies, with a long history, developing and supporting decades worth of consumer products.
I've taken on the responsibility of coming up with a way of classifying all our products, assets, and deliverables throughout history for these companies. The products in particular can be classified according to the parent-child relationships you might find in a DAM's folder structure, such as:
...but there's one other aspect I'm having trouble with: these products can vary over their lifespans. For example, a product with the same name might have a modification or internal design improvement that affects its technical documentation, and the service manuals etc. for such products would all need to be available on Sites, whether new or old, so that servicers can search for a product based on its serial number, and get the appropriate documentation, for any vintage of product.
In the past, we've dealt with this evolution of products according to serial number breaks. For example, products with a serial number prior to 123456 have one coil with a certain resistance value, and products whose serials start with 123456 have an improved coil with a different value. Our convention is to describe these serial number breaks as "PTS <serial number>" and "SWS <serial number>"
Of course, many of these serial number breaks overlap within individual products. A product with a certain serial number could contain a variety of parts whose parameters or procedures are punctuated by serial number breaks.
So, I would like to ask: in AEM, what's the best way to describe/locate content that can vary according to serial number? I was thinking there might be a way to use a piece of metadata (a field or a sort of metadata tag with a variable in it) in which we could enter "PTS 123456" or "SWS 123456", and then an AEM DAM search (or possibly in our case, an API call from elsewhere) could search on a serial number value and do a bit of math, such as "show me the items with these tags, and whose serial number metadata is less than "PTS <serial number>" and greater than "SWS <serial number>". I don't know whether that would take some kind of development effort on our part.
Has anyone had any experience with this kind of twist on very big taxonomies with long histories, and has anyone settled on a best practice for it?
Thanks, I look forward to hearing what you think!
Eric
