Storing custom metadata with HS3

With the HS3 API, you use x-amz-meta- request headers to specify custom metadata. You can use these headers when you store or copy an object.

With the x-amz-meta- header, you specify custom metadata as property/value pairs. You append the property name to the header and specify the value of the property as the value of the header. For example, to give an object a department property with a value of Sales&Mktg and a year property with a value of 2013, you would specify these headers:

x-amz-meta-department: Sales&Mktg
x-amz-meta-year: 2013

HCP stores the custom metadata you specify with HS3 as an annotation named .metapairs. In this annotation, the property/value pairs are stored as well-formed XML in which each property is represented by an element. For example, the XML stored for the headers shown above is:

<metapairs version="600">
    <meta-department><![CDATA[Sales&Mktg]]></meta-department>
     <meta-year><![CDATA[2013]]></meta-year>
</metapairs>

The root element in the .metapairs annotation is metapairs.

For each property/value pair, the name of the corresponding element is the concatenation of meta- and the property name, modified if necessary to be a valid XML element name. Valid XML element names can contain alphanumeric characters, periods (.), hyphens (-), underscores (_), and colons (:). When creating element names from property names, HCP changes any other character to an underscore. For example, the property name city/town becomes the element name city_town.

For each property/value pair, the property value becomes the value of the corresponding element. This value is enclosed in a CDATA section.

If you specify an x-amz-meta- header with no value, HCP doesn’t store an element for the property named in the header. If all the x-amz-meta- headers you specify have no value, HCP doesn’t create a .metapairs annotation for the object.

In a request to store or copy an object, you can specify the same x-amz-meta- property multiple times with different values. In the .metapairs annotation XML, these values are stored as comma-separated values for a single element.

Here’s an example that shows three occurrences of the same property along with the resulting XML:

x-amz-meta-author: P.D. Grey
x-amz-meta-author: Morgan White
x-amz-meta-author: Paris Black

<metapairs>
     <meta-author>
          <![CDATA[P.D. Grey,Morgan White,Paris Black]]>
     </meta-author>
</metapairs>

Property names are case sensitive, so names that differ only in case correspond to separate XML elements. For example, these x-amz-meta- headers result in three separate XML elements: x-amz-meta-date_written, x-amz-meta-Date_Written, and x-amz-meta-DATE_WRITTEN.

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