Every file we create and use each day in our computers have their own set of attributes that perfectly describe them. These attributes are usually unique to each file type apart from a couple of quite common attributes like the created date, modified date.

Why worry about these attributes? These attributes come in very handy when we are working on a file system based automation solutions. This component provides an activity which can easily access and retrieve all the properties of any given file. This activity will not only provide the standard and common attributes, but it will look for the extended attributes as well. Extended attributes are the attributes that are quite unique to each file type. For example, mp4 files have lots of unique attributes like bit rate, frame size, video length, directors etc.

This activity provides all that information in a Dictionary<String>, <String> format. The activity will look for every attribute of a given file type and validate whether those attributes have any values defined. The attributes that do not have any defined value will be excluded from the output it generates. Every attribute that has a defined value will be added to a Dictionary type and will be returned to the user.

Input: File path: provide the file path of the file you need to extract metadata from.

Output: Extracted Data (Dictionary<String>,<String>): All the extracted metadata will be returned in this format. The attribute name will be described in the Key of the dictionary and its value will be under the value segment of the dictionary. 

Each file type contains different sets of attributes that are unique to their type. These attributes describe the file types. How about an activity that can extract all that information?

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UiPath MVP/ RPA Solution Architect

Visual Basic

Will it provide all meta data if file is hidden also ?

While downloading this custom activity it is always downloading "FileMetaDataReader.Activities.1.0.4.nupkg" file with 0 KB. 

Hi Lahiru, first of all I want to thank you for your excellent work on the component, it is being very useful to me. 

I have a problem and I wanted to see if it would be possible to solve it, I am using it in MP3 files and there are some fields in the Origin section that I cannot recover:

They are: Editor, encoded by, Author's URL and copyright. 

I would like to know if it would be possible to implement them in some way.

Currently the link does not work, I suggest downloading from the following url: https://gallery.uipath.com/packages/FileMetaDataReader.Activities/

Will this also extract user defined metadata? 

 - Hi Lahiru. A very useful component specially when validating an input file.
I suggest that you include the list of information that will be extracted in the component description. 
Keep it up!


File Metadata Reader

File Metadata Reader

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