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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
  • Optional SKU selection before 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)

How Metadata Is Stored​

Quantaprice stores metadata in a compact, structure-friendly format:

  • Key names are shared across entries
  • Values are stored as lists, not single strings
  • Lookups are optimised using bitmap indexes for performance

The metadata structure is optional — items without metadata are fully supported.

Metadata and Pricing​

Metadata does not affect the final price directly. Instead, it integrates with the pricing model in the following ways:

Inheritance​

If metadata is attached to a pricelist, child pricelists inherit it unless explicitly overridden.

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:

  • Selecting a subset of SKUs before running a query
  • 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 supports internal workflows and segmentation without affecting final price calculation. By keeping metadata optional and schema-free, Quantaprice allows businesses to organise and maintain large catalogs without introducing dependency on a rigid structure.