Question

Importing files into LF and preserving windows metadata

Laserfiche Import Agent Migration How To Workflow

Updated August 14, 2023

asked on August 1, 2023

Hi,

For the next step of our implementation, we are migrating content from a windows fileshare into Laserfiche 11, and we would like to preserve the Last Edited date, File Created date, and author information from Windows upon import.

I have been reading posts from the help forums, and it seems like there is a way to do this using workflow tokens and import agent. I have tried using the tokens for author/date created/date modified in a test import agent profile (see below), but they didn't seem to change the file metadata at all - upon importing into LF, the edited/updated dates defaulted to the date of import.

I did see some posts about using Workflow to update file metadata, but have a couple of questions - first, if I am using workflow, is workflow capable of overriding details assigned on import such as date created and date modified (which would default to the import date) and replacing those with the windows values so that those dates can be preserved? If yes, how do we go about doing that?- Second, can it be used to point at a windows fileshare location to get those metadata references? or is there a better way of creating that association?

I have also found mentions of using quick fields for that too, and am not sure which approach would be best. Any assistance would be appreciated!

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Replies

replied on August 1, 2023

Nothing is going to override the values in the Created and Created By column. Those reflect the date when the document was created in Laserfiche and the user who did it.

You can keep the "original" values from when the files were created on disk in template fields. But you can't use them to update the system columns.

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replied on August 2, 2023

All right, thanks for this clarification, I appreciate it!

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replied on August 1, 2023 • Show version history

I believe this information is stored in the repository database under the toc table. Your workflow would have to update this information in the backend. I would advise you to create a backup if you go this route.

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replied on August 2, 2023 • Show version history

TOC only stores relevant information about electronic files, specifically the extension and the mime type. For the Windows file creation date and maybe the modification date, you'd need to either use File System Objects, or even easier, the old Dir command or the Powershell equivalent. "Easier" here being relative.

The right Dir command will give you text file that you can parse using Notepad++ and Excel, into a format you can load into a database. Then have Workflow match on the filename and retrieve the creation date and other info you want from that table.

It's a bit of work, hopefully the information is worth it.

Dir /s E:\Temp\*.pdf > E:\Temp\MyPDFFiles.txt

will write the contents of the Dir command, for all subdirectories (/s) to a file named MyPDFFiles.txt. Then you clean it up and load it into a DB.

Dir reference:

https://www.lifewire.com/dir-command-4050018

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replied on August 2, 2023

hmm okay, thank you. I figured out how to use tokens in import agent to assign the created/modified dates to template fields like Miruna suggested (it's a shame about not being able to have the Windows values just transfer when files are imported). I'm trying to get a process to handle the Author/Owner field now. Thanks for your assistance!

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replied on August 14, 2023

Hello, not sure if all your files are PDF. We had a project where we started with import agent, but changed to workflow so we could use the PDF Metadata tool. You may be able to capture PDF's metadata for Created and Modified

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replied on August 14, 2023

oooooh that's a great thing to know, thank you! the vast majority of our files will be PDFs, I'll bring this back to our project team and look into this further.

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replied on August 14, 2023

Hello again, here is a screenshot of the PDF properties and our workflow. We were able to extract Title, so would think you could get Created and Modified.

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Importing files into LF and preserving windows metadata

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