By: Sierra Jahoda, User Education

When managing or administering metadata, it’s important to follow guidelines to help ensure a consistent and well-organized system. You should create general fields, tags, and other metadata objects whenever possible to avoid cluttering your repository with single-use items. For example, limiting the number of fields makes it easier for users to choose the right field for entries they’re working with.

Fields are one of the easiest metadata objects to create too many of

Before creating a new field, check if a similar field already exists in your repository. There are two ways to do this in the Laserfiche Administration Console: sort field columns or perform a node search.  In the desktop Laserfiche Administration Console, node searches let you find fields based on their names or properties (i.e., date, list, number, etc.). For example, if you need a date field for a specific template, you can search for field type to find all date fields in your repository.

What to do if multiple fields match your criteria

If you’ve located two or more fields that are being used for essentially the same purpose, you can merge the fields into one (learn the steps to merging fields). When merging fields, Laserfiche creates a new field and migrates the values from the merged fields into the new one. Laserfiche will then delete the original fields, leaving the repository with a single new field containing the original field values. Doing this helps you manage the number of fields in your repository. It’s important to note that there are some rules to follow when merging fields.

Fields of the same type can be merged, or fields of any type can be merged into a text or list field. For cases where a document has values in more than one of the fields that are being merged, you have three options: merge all values into a multi-value field, choose to use the value from one of the fields, or cancel the merge and resolve the issue before merging.

For more information on fields and templates administration, see Fields and Templates in the Laserfiche Administration Guide.