The Motivation

Until M5 Magnolia stored MetaData on a separate subnode - among others this

• made complex queries (JCR_SQL2/JQOM) more complicated (if not outright impossible) as one had to use joins to access MetaData (e.g. for sorting by values in metadata)
  
  • some of the joins are extremely slow
• doubled the amount of nodes in repo
• forced to treat MetaData separately in Java
• made exported xml harder to read
• duplicated properties like jcr:created and jcr:createdBy
  
  

The Implementation 

The properties hosted on the MetaData subnode are replaced by several fine grained mixins. Property names got consolidated.

New Mixins

[mgnl:lastModified]
  MIXIN

• mgnl:lastModified (DATE)
• mgnl:lastModifiedBy (STRING)

[mgnl:activatable]
  MIXIN

• mgnl:lastActivated (DATE)
• mgnl:lastActivatedBy (STRING)
• mgnl:activationStatus (STRING)

Mapping

Convenience

In order easily see what custom nodeType defines what properties we created info.magnolia.jcr.util.NodeTypes.

It hosts a proper inner class for each node type together with the constants for all it's properties and some convenience methods.

Backwards Compatibility

• info.magnolia.cms.core.MetaData has been adapted to be fully backwards compatible
  • If you have code still using the MetaData type and the old property names, we'll internally map these to the new property names on the workingNode. 

Migration

Bootstrap files

• We still support Bootstrap files containing MetaData subsides
  
  • info.magnolia.importexport.postprocessors.MetaDataImportPostProcessor will take care of moving the contained properties to the workingNode and rename to the new structure

Repositories

• in next Sprint (s011) we'll add an InstallationTask migrating existing content to the new repository layout