Associated files request

[oranfry]

Associated files: here is the request:

The Contemporary African Music and Arts Archive (www.cama.org.za) is planning to do an interesting Greenstone collection. They want to make extensive use of the "associated files" mechanism that David put in. But there is a problem, a single document may have several associated files of the same type (e.g. movies), and the mechanism doesn't currently allow that, right? A file X.doc can have associated files X.mov, X.jpg, etc, but not more than one of the same type.

Is it possible for us to extend the mechanism so that you can put in some kind of regular expression, so that you could associate X1.mov, X2.mov, X3.mov with a single document X.doc? Of course they would need to establish the corresponding file naming convention, but that is no problem in their situation.

(I presume that associated files appear as metadata elements, and can be included in format statements, and that multiple files will appear as multiple-valued metadata, and that the parent/sibling mechanism can be used to get at the individual metadata values for use in format statements. Right?)

[kjdon]

we have associate_tail_re which does exactly this.

however, I don't know if the resulting metadata will work as they want...

[kjdon]

I think this is done now.