Metadata Schema Tips

[willardc]

I have been tasked with creating a new custom metadata schema and I was hoping to get some insight on how others might be tackling the problem.

What we currently have is several dropdown menus that have associations between one another for various products and their accessories/sub-categories. That seems to work well for us but it starts to break down when we are adding our SKUs numbers. We have well over a thousand SKUs and adding them to an associated dropdown menu is both tedious to manage and tedious to use. The original reason for doing it this way was to be able to do a specific product SKU search in the filter rail but I can't help but think there is a much better way to tag product photo assets with multiple SKUs and still have them filterable.

So my questions are: 

How do others handle a similar situation so that their assets can be easily filterable (product>sub-category>SKUs)

Is there a way to filter by a specific set of tags? Does that even make sense to have as an option?

I am VERY new to this and have been tossed into this trial by fire so any pointers as to how to dig up this info or links to specific guides would be very helpful and appreciated! Im new enough that I'm not quite sure what terms to be searching for so my search results are all over the place and largely unhelpful. 

Also, as I'm so new I'm having difficulty even finding a starting point to learn AEM in a way my company needs. If anyone has any tips on where to start learning AEM from a DAM perspective with a focus on product photography/multimedia that would be lovely.

[Adilos-Cantuerk]

Hi there, this sounds very interesting.
Could you please elaborate a little more about this challenge?
We currently have all the filter logic built behind a combination of folder structure and the tagging system. 
Since the tags are structured like a hierarchy, it is easy to create different namespaces and substructures within.
User can not enter a tag that is not available in the tagging structure and it is possible to enrich tags with descriptions. The search function then can be based on a tag predicate. Also it is possible to have multiple tags on a picture. The "match-all" option provides an additional option to filter down search results as well as the filepath.

[willardc]

We have several products that have subcategories with subcategories that can have hundreds of SKUs associated with them. It seemed using tags to add SKU numbers to our images was going to be the best method. We had to get some help installing a tag creator option in the AEM Commons section of our tools so I don't have to input all of the 1000+ Skus we have one at a time. We are still going to use the dropdown boxes for the higher level associations rather than tagging because of their ease of use on the brand portal search rail over having everything as a tag.

Sorry if that doesn't make sense. It is still barely making sense to me. Im sure there is a better way to go about all of this but I'm new enough that I still don't have the proper vocabulary to describe what I want to do lol.

[Adilos-Cantuerk]

Could you describe the settings for the drop-downs a bit? Simplified.

I imagine it to be a drop-down for category A, B and C.

User selects A and another drop-down appears with subcategories 1, 2 and 3… , user selects 3 and get another drop-down with 100 sku Numbers to choose from. But now you do not have a option to select multiple SKUs since the drop-down is a single value field?

Is this accurate?

[willardc]

This is pretty close. They were all multi select drop-downs but we had rules set so that if you selected product A the next field would only show options that pertained to A rather than all of the accessories and that would cascade to to the potential SKUs, but there could be hundreds of potential SKUs at the end of that cascade.

So we have taken a hybrid approach. For our main categories and subcategories that don't have a ton of options we have kept the multi select lists and use a rule so that the subcategory choices are dependent on the main category choices. For the SKUs we have opted to use a tag field and in our tags section I have set up a new namespace for our SKUs. If you have ACS AEM Commons installed there is a tool in the Manage Control Processes called Tag Creator. With that tool you can create your tag/SKU topology in a spreadsheet and upload thousands at a time if need be rather than one at a time.

I hope that makes sense.

[Adilos-Cantuerk · Accepted solution]

Your approach seems to be working but to be uncomfortable? 
If you would use a custom dropdown property, that you fill by adding a json path, set the dropdown rule to multivalue.
AND use the folder structure in addition, you can make multiple metadata schemata, that you then apply to the folders accordingly.

Maybe it is possible to sort your assets in the folders in a way that you loose some of the options?
What i want to describe is a setting in which you have folders that allows for certain values, while others don't.
For example ./jcr:content/metadata/sku-category: Which then can contain A, B and C
./jcr:content/metadata/sku-product-a-id: Which then can contain 1 to 100
./jcr:content/metadata/sku-product-b-id: Which then can contain 1 to 100, etc.

./jcr:content/metadata/sku-detail-id: which can contain 1 to 100
and so on
Then have metadata schemata X that gives only the dropdown-choices category A and C, Product-a-ID 1,32,45-78,82-100 and Product-c-ID 25-47, 85, 100
Depending on the choices somebody took, make selecter 3 and 4 visible etc.pp.
But another Folder has metadata schemata Y that gives options according to your choosing.
That way a user might not have to scroll the very very long dropdowns and has less invalid choices?

[Adilos-Cantuerk]

@willardc 
Hi there, i just wanted to ask if you have solved this riddle in the meantime?

[kautuk_sahni]

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