About editing and deleting metadata values
The document management software stores drill down and drop down metadata values as pointers to the actual values. This makes it very easy to changes these values after metadata has already been added to documents. Any changes to the selection text values for these metadata fields is automatically available to all documents that were previously tagged with the value. This is also true if you delete a selection text value. It will be deleted on all documents at the same time.
If you are using a FileHold managed list, there are a couple of different techniques that can be used if you would like to preserve a selection text value you would like to remove from the list.
- The order of the list can be easily controlled with the Move Up or Move Down buttons. The old value can be moved to the end of the list. You can add the text "do not use" or something similar to the value to let users know the value should not be used any more.
- Add a metadata field specially for preserving the old data. Add the field to any schemas you would like to save the data for. Use advanced search to find all the documents with the old metadata value, select them all, then open the metadata pane for editing. You will be able to edit all selected documents at the same time. Simply add the necessary value to your newly created field and click save. With all documents updated the selection text value can be deleted. The new field for preserving the data can be set to read only if desired.
- When a metadata menu value has been deleted it is automatically removed from every document that it was assigned to, so delete with caution. There is no undo function.
The same rules as above apply for a database managed list. A big difference is that it is possible to change or delete thousands of records in an instant. If records are deleted by mistake they cannot be recovered even if the original value is added back to the source table. The values on the documents will already be gone. Depending on your overall solution design, it may be necessary or convenient to update the source table en masse by dropping the table then creating it again. This should be done with extreme caution to avoid the situation that the table is dropped, but not recreated before the synchronization task runs.
The correct method for doing this is to wait for the task to complete in case it is running, disable the task, make the source table change, and enable the task. Optionally the task can be run immediately to load the changes. If you need assistance to create this solution, FileHold Professional Services are available to help.