Creating a drill down menu

Drill down menus offer a multi-level tree structure for the user to select the metadata value from. When a user makes a selection at the first level, a second level of choices will appear that are related to the choice at the first level and so on up to eight levels deep.

For example, imagine a field used to select a specific department in an organization. The organization is broken into two organizational units: North America and Europe. The organizational units operate largely independently and each contain their own independent departments. Both have their own finance and HR departments. Europe also has an R&D department and North America has a Manufacturing department. Europe has Sales departments broken into Central Europe, United Kingdom and Southern Europe. North American Sales are broken into East and West.

Selecting a drill down option:

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Drill down menu selection in metadata pane

Displaying a selected option:

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Drill down menu selection in metadata pane

To create drill down menus

  1. In the Web Client, go to  Administration Panel > Library Configuration > Metadata Fields.
  • Alternatively, in the FDA, go to Administration > Manage Schemas > Metadata Fields.
  1. In the Add Metadata Field pane, enter a Name for the metadata.

  2. Enter a Description for the metadata.

  3. Select a Drill Drop Down Menu.

  4. From the Web Client, click Manage Menu Items.

  • From the FDA, click the Field Properties tab. Add, Edit, Delete, and organize the order of the drop down list.

  1. Type in the first entry for the drop-down menu and click Add. Continue to add menu items until all selections are added.

  2. Select one of the existing drop-down menu items and to create the "branches" and/or "leaves" (sub menu items) of the drill down "tree" structure.

  3. Type in the first "branch" or "leaf" name and click Add. The item will appear under the selected menu item and the selected menu item will display a plus sign next to it.

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Managing drill down menu items
  1. Continue to add sub menu items to all the menu items until completed.

  2. Enter a Separator type such as -, _, < or /. The default is >.

The separator is used when displaying the drill down menu value or as the result from a merge tag when the show full path option is selected. It is also used when specifying a drill down menu value in an import.

  1. By default, only the selected node of the drill down menu tree will be displayed. If you want to show the full path of the drill down menu selection in the metadata field box, select the Show Full Path check box. For example, if a user selects France then Île-de-France then Paris they would see the value shown as Paris by default. If they checked the Show Full Path check box the value would be shown as France>Île-de-France>Paris.

  2. By default, you can select any option in the drill down menu regardless of what level it is at. If you only want to be able select values that have no children, check the Select Only Leaves check box.

  3. Select an Initial Value where needed. When you do this, the user will be not be required to select any value if they simply want to accept the configured initial value.

  4. From the Web Client, click Save.

  • From the FDA, click OK.

 

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Drill down metadata field configuration