External Tags

Contents

• External Tags

  • Meta Filename

New in version 2.10.

The goal of this feature is to allow users to provide additional metadata when crawling files. Whenever a directory is crawled, FSCrawler checks if a file named .meta.yml is present in the directory. If it is, the content of this file is used to enrich the document.

For example, if you have a file named .meta.yml in the directory /path/to/data/dir:

external:
  myTitle: "My document title"

Then the document indexed will have a new field named external.myTitle with the value My document title.

Only supported fields can be added to the document. If you try to add a field which is not supported, it will be ignored.

For example, if you have the .meta.yml file contains:

foo: "bar"
external:
  myTitle: "My document title"

The document indexed will have a new field named external.myTitle with the value My document title. The field foo will be ignored.

If you really want to add a field named foo, you need to add it first as an external tag:

external:
  foo: "bar"
  myTitle: "My document title"

and then use an ingest pipeline to rename the external.foo field to foo. See Using Ingest Node Pipeline.

The .meta.yml file can also overwrite existing fields. For example, if you have the following .meta.yml file:

content: "HIDDEN"

Then the content field will be replaced by HIDDEN even though something else is extracted.

Note

The .meta.yml file is not indexed. It is only used to enrich the document.

Here is a list of Tags settings (under tags. prefix)`:

Name	Default value	Documentation
tags.metaFilename	".meta.yml"	Meta Filename

Meta Filename

You can use another filename for the external tags file. For example, if you want to use meta_tags.json instead of .meta.yml, you can set:

tags:
  metaFilename: "meta_tags.json"

Note

Only json and yaml files are supported.