source: trunk/gli/help/en/explodingfiles.htm@ 12723

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revision of GLI help text for version 2.71

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4<title>The Greenstone Librarian Interface - Help Pages</title>
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9<td width="15%" align="center"><img width="45" src="../gatherer_medium.gif" height="45"></td><td width="*" align="center"><a name="explodingfiles"><font size="5" face="Verdana"><strong>4.7: Exploding Metadata Files</strong></font></a></td><td width="15%" align="center"><img width="45" src="../gatherer_medium.gif" height="45"></td>
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14<p>Metadata database file types, such as MARC, CDS/ISIS, BibTex, Refer, Procite etc. can be imported into Greenstone but their metadata cannot be viewed or edited in the Librarian Interface. To see or edit any metadata, you need to go back to the program that created the file.</p>
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17<i>Exploding</i> a metadata database file splits it into individual records, with viewable and editable metadata. This process is irreversible: once this step has been done, the metadata file is deleted.</p>
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19<p>Explodable files have a green coloured icon in the Collection tree. To explode one, right click on it and choose "Explode metadata database". A popup window is displayed, showing options for the exploding process. The first option ("plugin") specifies the plugin to be used for exploding. In most cases, only one plugin will process a particular type of file, but in some cases, where different file types share the same filename extension, there may be two plugins that both process files with that extension. The "input_encoding" option can be used to specify the encoding of the database. The "metadata_set" option specifies which metadata set the new fields should be added into. If none is specified, then you will be prompted for what to do with each new field found in the database: add it as a new element to an existing metadata set, merge with another element, or ignore.</p>
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21<p>When a file is exploded, a new empty document is created for each record, and the metadata from the record is assigned to the document. These are named using numbers such as 000001.nul, 000002.nul etc. If the "document_field" option is set (to a database field name), then the value of this field, if present, will be used for the filename. The exploding process will also try to download the file, and use this instead of an empty file. The "document_prefix" and "document_suffix" options can be used to make a valid URL or file path from the document_field value. The "records_per_folder" option can be used to group exploded records into sub-folders. If the database is very large, using this option will make future metadata editing run faster.</p>
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23<p>Explodability is determined by file extension. In some cases, files may be incorrectly labelled as explodable.</p>
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