Free-text fields are often necessary but present opportunities for inconsistency in your metadata. To help provide more consistency in your free-text fields, pre-populated fields could be the solution.

Pre-populated free-text fields are possible when using a dropdown metadata field with a free-text field dependency. Dependent fields need to be created first before you create pre-populated metadata fields. (Learn more about dependent metadata fields, including how to create them, here.)

Once you’ve created free-text dependent fields, approved, standardized text options can be added to the dependent text fields in upload profiles. This allows the options to appear in the metadata fields for the assets uploaded using that upload profile.
 

Create pre-populated free-text metadata fields ¶

In the Admin app, create a new upload profile, or choose an existing one to which you wish to add standardized text options, then edit the default metadata of the upload profile.

Find the dropdown field with free-text dependencies to be pre-populated and select one of the controlled vocabulary options in the dropdown field.

 

 

This will open the dependent free-text field. 

 

 

Add the standardized text that should be used when that controlled vocabulary option is selected.

 

 

Repeat these steps for all of the desired dependent free-text fields. 

 

 

To keep the free-text field blank until the uploader chooses the desired dropdown value, unselect any values from the dropdown field before updating the upload profile.

 

 

Click Update to save the changes to the upload profile.

 

 

Use pre-populated free-text metadata fields¶

For the pre-populated text to appear in the metadata for an asset, the asset must be added to the Acquia DAM using the upload profile to which the pre-populated text has been added.

 

It can be added to individual assets that have been uploaded using the pre-populated upload profile by going to the Asset Details page and editing the metadata.

 

 

As a reminder:

• Pre-populated text can only be selected when the asset was uploaded using the pre-populated upload profile.
• Changes to the pre-populated text within the upload profile do not change the text in existing assets. If changes are required to pre-populated text on existing assets, a batch edit can be performed to update the text.
• The pre-populated text can still be edited at any time on assets once they're in the DAM.