Sort using metadata from a job

darleneroy · Post by **darleneroy** » Wed Oct 08, 2014 7:36 pm

Hello, Hopefully I'm explaining this right. I would like to sort jobs according to a section of metadata from the job being submitted.

For example we have pdfs that come in as 8.5 x 11 and need to get resized into three different sizes depending on school divisions. So PRI, ELE etc. are one size. SEC, MED are another size and INT is another size.

When submitted the client will have to choose one of these options which then gets attached to the end of the job name. I want sort to pick up this variable and then sort it into which ever size goes with that varible.

eg. 12345_WHATEVERSCHOOL_PRI I want the sort to pick up the variable position of PRI because that will change out. Then sort it into a folder for resizing.

How do I use sort that way. Please keep in mind that I'm a novice so if you can dump it down a bit I would really appreciate it.

gabrielp · Post by **gabrielp** » Wed Oct 08, 2014 8:05 pm

I think you would want to have all of these files go into a folder, then have several paths going out. The "include these jobs" with single line text with values, saying is jobnameproper after second underscore is == to INT then send it this way, if == to ECS then send it that way, etc...

But... It's kind of not the best of of doing things grabbing that data to a filename. Especially if there could be other underscores elsewhere. Why not store in PrivateData? It should already be in metadata from the submit, you could just use that and use metadata text and build location path. Does the job lose its metadata in your flow somehow?

darleneroy · Post by **darleneroy** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 4:22 pm

No it still has all the metadata, i want it to grab the meta data that it makes and use that. I also have the option of quite hot imposing, someone told me I can make templates and then grab the appropriate template according to the metadata. But I'm not 100% on how to do that or what that variable would look like. Any thoughts on that??

gabrielp · Post by **gabrielp** » Thu Oct 09, 2014 5:47 pm

darleneroy wrote: No it still has all the metadata, i want it to grab the meta data that it makes and use that. I also have the option of quite hot imposing, someone told me I can make templates and then grab the appropriate template according to the metadata. But I'm not 100% on how to do that or what that variable would look like. Any thoughts on that??

Well, if it still has its metadata then you can use single line text with values of the "include these jobs" parameter of your path and specify metadata > text > "build location path", then browse to external datasets and browse for the value. You can then say if that value == this, send it to this folder.

Not sure what "hot imposing" is, but once it's in the correct folder (sorted) you can define an imposition in a few different ways. Assuming it's an Indigo, you could make that hotfolder with a ticket template assigned (which has an imposition option), you could also use the JDF configurator to build the job and send the JDF to the press directly, or even lay it out in smartstream if you want to build an imposed PDF ahead of sending it to the press.

Does that answer your question?