We keep on enriching the Reporter data model. This time we’ve added support for metadata fields that accept multiple values. This note describes this change in full, and as usual you can contact support or your Technical Account Manager for further clarification.
The title catalogue at the heart of the BeBanjo products is highly configurable. At most levels of the catalogue’s hierarchy (e.g., series, title, version…), you can ask your Technical Account Manager to configure the metadata fields of your choice. We support many native data types (i.e., strings, date times, drop-downs…) and fields can be configured to accept multiple values. For instance, you may have your own list of genres in a drop-down, and each title can have multiple genres associated with it.
Of course, you’d like all this data available in your own Reporter data warehouse, so you can create custom reports and dashboards. So we have just added to Reporter support for metadata fields with multiple values.
For the techies, here is how it works. Fields with multiple values get their own tables in Reporter’s BigQuery data store, named series_metadata_multiple, titles_metadata_multiple, versions_metadata_multiple… Each row represents a value given to a metadata field, and a single entity (i.e., series, titles, versions…) can have multiple rows representing multiple values. So, for instance, if title with ID 256608 has genres “Mini-series”, “Action” and “Drama”, then you will find the 3 following rows in the titles_metadata_multiple table:
| title_id | metadata_name | metadata_value |
|---|---|---|
| … | … | … |
| 235608 | genre | Mini-series |
| 235608 | genre | Action |
| 235608 | genre | Drama |
| … | … | … |
With a bit of SQL magic or Tableau wizardry, you will have no problem finding, say, all films by Quentin Tarantino of genre “Children” and “Educational”. If such films exist.
References
reporter#84Multi-valued metadata