Good morning, everyone,
I'm a beginner on Appian, and I'm wondering:
is there a way to manage the properties or metadata of the folders and documents in Appian,
for example: I want to add the customer reference in the properties of my invoice document.
Is this possible? If not, is there a simple workaround?
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There are smart services to manage simple metadata (name/description) of documents and folders. For example:
https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/19.4/Edit_Document_Properties_Smart_Service.html
However, for cases where more detailed metadata is needed, we'll store more detailed metadata in our RDBMS and map that to the Appian document by ID. You could then have data relationships to a customer, invoice, etc, which will be more flexible for searching and displaying associated data within a record.
To reinforce what Justin already said above, I strongly recommend creating a database backbone for the document management/metadata needs in any Appian system or application. The baked-in document controls give us no control over certain things, for one thing, and also there is no easy way to add extended info or easy querying/searching/aggregating.
Hello , Justin Watts
I have a background in ECM and normally these "databases" are created from scratch, but I understand the concept.
Do you think it's better to create a database to manage this data per application or do I create one to manage all the metadata of all my applications?
I ask you this question because I want to create in the future an application dependent on all the others that will just allow documents management (consult, search, etc...)
If your system is multi-application in nature and users typically have access to more than one of them, then it's probably worthwhile to build a platform-level document database where, among the other metadata you capture, each row stores an applicaton ID or similar.
The only real way to tell up-front whether to go with a platform-level or application-level DB, of the top of my head, is to analyze up front whether there will be significant differences in the different types of metadata you'd expect to capture for each document within the different applications.
Justin Watts
Thank you for your answers