Browse by Metadata Tags

Egnyte provides powerful built-in metadata capabilities that allow the users to efficiently set metadata properties on a large number of files and folders, and enable quick searching of content based on metadata. 

Browse by Metadata Tags brings a new and unique way to navigate through the content using metadata tags. It enables the users to navigate to the files and folders of interest regardless of the overall folder structure or where each individual file may be located in the folder tree. Users can navigate the collection of tagged documents by simply clicking on Tag values and automatically filtering the files and folders to the matching results. 

 

Browse By Tags View 

Click on the Browse by Tags toggle near the top-right of a folder list view.  

 

This changes the display mode to ‘Browse by Tags’.  A new pane opens up that shows all the metadata properties (tags) that have any value applied to any of the files in the current folder tree. 

The tags are divided in two separate sections 

• System Tags: System tags are created and applied by the system, such as Secure and Govern Policy Tags, and Document Tags.
• Custom Tags: Custom Tags are user-defined metadata. 

Learn more about Metadata in Egnyte.

Choose one or more values from the dropdown menus to filter the results based on the tags selected.

For example: select ‘Confidentiality Information memorandums’ to narrow the list of files shown to include only those files that have the matching label applied to them.

Users can mix and match values from different properties to narrow down their search. As Tag values are selected, the list of chosen values appear on top. The user can click on the x symbol to remove any given filter. 

As the user chooses one or more Tag values to filter their view, some of the Tags in the left pane become disabled and are displayed as greyed out. For example, in the figure below, after choosing ‘Confidential Information Memorandum’, all the other items in the left pane get grayed out. This means that all the files with the label ‘Confidential Information Memorandum’, do not have any of the other Tag values set. 

Search Tags

Users can search for the tags using the search option in the left pane. 

Hide Disabled Tags

Some of the tags may be disabled as there may not be any content matching with the current filter. The user can click on the Hide disabled tags checkbox to hide any disabled tags.

Enumerated vs Freeform Tags 

Fundamentally, there are two types of metadata properties. 

Enumerated properties: These are the properties that can only contain a finite set of values. 

For example: Project Status can only contain a handful of distinct values. On the other hand, a property like ‘Address’ can contain any of the billions of possible values. 

All enumerated Tags in the left pane display a drop-down menu when clicked. The drop-down menus contain all possible values for that Tag. The user can choose one or more values in the menu to filter their results. 

 

Freeform Tags do not show a drop-down menu. When a user clicks on a freeform property, the display gets filtered down to show all items that have any value set for that property. 

For example, if a user clicks on the ‘Address’ property, the display shows all items where the Address is set to any value. If the user needs to search for all files with a specific value, they can kick-off advanced metadata search from the bottom of the Tags pane. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

Why do some tags appear as active, but when a user clicks on them, the screen displays "No results found"?

There are a number of reasons why there may be no results found for a Tag that appears active and clickable:  

• The user may not have permissions to see the tagged files 
• The tagged files were recently moved or deleted and the tags have not yet been re-indexed 
• If the tag is an enumerated type, the dropdown menu is marked as active as long as at least one value from the list is assigned to a file. However, not all values in the menu may have files associated with them, so clicking on certain values might show "No results found”

The user launches the browse by tags view from one folder, but they wish to go to another folder without losing the filters already set. Is this possible?

The folder tree pane gets collapsed in the ‘Browse by Tag’ view. However, the folder tree can be expanded by clicking on the ‘expand’ arrow as shown below. Once the folder tree is visible, the user can navigate to any folder. As long as any files in the new folder tree match the filters, the filters will remain applied. 

Can a user save their Browse by Tags view with all the applied filters, and share it with their colleagues? 

Currently, save and share functionality is not available for Browse by Tags views. However, it will be available in a future release.