Hi James

Use the UnifiedFile class. It has a public property for accessing the summary.

• UnifiedFile class in the SDK
• EPiServer: Using the new Unified File System

Thanks for the links.

That looks like it might be along the right lines. I'm investigating if I can provide an mechanism for a third party site to get all particular documents from EpiServer by category. So, for example provide a web service which when called would look at the category supplied and get a collection of documents from EpiServer which matched that category.

Is something like that possible?

Sounds like quite a project. I think I would setup a scheduled tasks that indexes this information for you. And then query against that index.

I had something similar.  Getting the properties for a single item isn't hard -- what's hard is querying multiple documents.

My idea was to write an index table of all the metadata -- so when a file was uploaded, I would save all the data from that file into a custom table, suitable for querying.

This works great, except that there's no capturable method for updating a file's metadata.  You can capture when a file is uploaded, but when a user just goes in and changes the metadata -- there's no way to capture that. So the table would be out-of-date as soon as someone did this.

I confirmed this with EPiServer support.  Their solution was to override the actual file metadata edit page, and expose my own event, which seems somewhat do-able.

The project is still turning, but I will have to do this at some point.  When it happens, I'll let you know what I come up with.