Q: Metadata keeps wanting to be saved on assets.
Greetings,
My location has a FCS installation as well as a FileMaker Server installation. We are pushing metadata from FMS via XML to FCS. This process works fine. However, when users are manipulating assets in FCS that have had metadata pushed into them from FMS they are asked to save metadata changes even though they haven't made any. Is anyone aware why this occurs? Over time all our assets in FCS will be populated by this XML push and it'll be a great irritation if each time an asset is accessed FCS asks to save changes that were never made.
Also, FYI, if you choose Save and then access and close the asset the save prompt still comes up.
Final Cut Server, Mac OS X (10.6.7)
Posted on Jun 16, 2011 8:35 AM
This sounds like the common "lookup problem" that many of us have had problems with. Did you recently assign a lookup to a text field that previously allowed free text entry? An example would be a "Client" field - let's say you had a text field for your client, and allowed the user to enter the client name, and then you later noticed an inconsistency in the data, like spelling or formatting errors. So you created a lookup containing all your clients and assigned the lookup to the field. When you do this, FCSvr doesn't know what to do with fields that contain values that are NOT in the lookup. For example, if my client was ABC Company, and my editors put it in as "ABC Co." or "ABC" and then I assigned a lookup to that field, and entered "ABC Company" in the lookup, FCSvr has no way of knowing that "ABC" and "ABC Co." mean "ABC Company." So it will constantly give you the "The metadata has changed" dialog box even if you simply open the asset and don't change anything. You have to make sure all fields with lookups assigned have field values that are included in those lookups. One way to test if this is your problem is to click through each lookup and make sure the values selected in every lookup in that metadata group have valid values. This isn't easy, because if one is incorrect, it may show blank or [None] and you will have no way of knowing without examining the metadata at the command line. It's a pain. There are definitely some holes in the implementation of lookups in FCSvr, I could give Apple a huge list!
Posted on Jun 17, 2011 12:46 PM