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Metadata

Metadata in Quantaprice provides a flexible way to attach additional, structured information to articles and pricelists. It is not used for customer-facing search or catalog browsing. Instead, metadata supports internal organisation, segmentation, maintenance workflows, and optional pre-selection of items before pricing.

Metadata is stored as key → list-of-values, allowing any number of values per key without requiring schema changes.

What Metadata Can Describe​

Metadata can be used for:

  • Internal segmentation of articles
  • Grouping products for maintenance
  • Identifying subsets of items for updating or inspection
  • Selecting pricelists in a price query
  • Marking pricelists with contextual attributes
  • Driving internal workflows that depend on product tags

Examples:

  • category = ["hardware"]
  • brand = ["acme"]
  • region = ["eu"]
  • season = ["summer", "clearance"]
  • customer_group = ["vip"] (pricelist metadata)

Metadata is optional; articles and pricelists without it are fully supported.

Metadata and Pricing​

Metadata takes part in pricing in these ways:

  • Price rules use article metadata in their filters to decide which articles a rule applies to; see Price Rules.
  • Price queries select pricelists by their metadata with pricelist_filter.metadata; see Querying Prices.

Inheritance​

Pricelist metadata is not inherited: each pricelist has its own. A child pricelist's rules can read its parent's metadata through the parent variable.

Bundles​

Bundle definitions may refer to components whose metadata is used in maintenance tools, but metadata does not alter bundle pricing.

Filtering and Pre-Selection​

Metadata is useful for:

  • Finding a subset of articles with article search
  • Maintenance tasks
  • Quality control or data audits

It is not intended for storefront-level product search.

Typical Internal Use Cases​

  • Bulk-update all SKUs in a category
  • Verify that all items in a region have correct VAT classes
  • Prepare a subset of products for price checks
  • Segment articles during import or integration
  • Identify products belonging to a lifecycle segment (e.g., discontinued, seasonal)

Metadata is specifically not a customer-facing feature. It does not support:

  • keyword search
  • faceted navigation
  • sorted search results
  • relevance scoring

These tasks remain the responsibility of the e-commerce or product information system.

Summary​

Metadata in Quantaprice is a flexible and efficient way to tag articles and pricelists with structured information. It drives which articles price rules apply to and which pricelists a query selects, and supports internal workflows and segmentation. By keeping metadata optional and schema-free, Quantaprice allows businesses to organise and maintain large catalogs without introducing dependency on a rigid structure.

See also​

  • Querying Prices — using pricelist_filter.metadata to select pricelists by metadata at query time.
  • Platform Overview — explains how article and pricelist metadata fit into the overall data model.
  • API Reference — full spec for the /article/metadata and /pricelist/metadata endpoints.