Cookbook: Generating metadata only, not content files

This recipe applies to all toolchains.

When testing your metadata mappings, or testing a metadata manipulator, you may only want to have MIK generate MODS XML files for your objects. To do this, within the [WRITER] section of your configuration file, add a datastreams[] setting with value 'MODS', e.g.,

[WRITER]
datastreams[] = MODS

This entry should be the only datastreams[] entry. When you run MIK, only the .xml files for your objects will be created, and they will contain the objects' MODS metadata.

Note that some toolchains will let you generate MODS files without having access to the source input files. For example, all of the CSV toolchains allow this by giving the "input_directory" setting a blank value ([FILE_GETTER]input_directory = ) and specifying MODS as the only datastream (e.g., [WRITER]datastreams[] = MODS). This configuration allows testing the generation of MODS without requiring access to the content files.

In addition, the CSV Single File toolchain lets you leave the the field identified in its [FILE_GETTER]file_name_field blank. If you run that toolchain with blank values in this field, MIK will generate MODS files that are named using the record_key value for each row. More information is available in the "The FILE_GETTER section" of that toolchain's documentation.

Note that you must also set [FILE_GETTER] validate_input = false, since if you don't, MIK will skip generation of any packages that don't have a source file, which in this case will be all of them.

Cookbook table of contents