With the ever-increasing number of available columns, courtesy of the Evaluator and the established script columns, it would be beneficial to simplify programmatic access.
How about introducing two new functions for the Evaluator and the scripting interface?
Metadata(item, column): This function returns the value of the specified column. The column can be any built-in or custom column, identified by either its name or headerkey. The item can be any file or folder.
MetadataType(column): This function returns the type of the specified column (string, date, integer, etc.), facilitating subsequent processing.
In the Evaluator, these would be standalone functions, while in the scripting interface, they could be integrated as methods within the DOpus or FSUtil object.
The Copy command e.g. would be really excited about this because it could finally match Rename's renaming features
One issue I see what that kind of API is each request would have to re-parse the file, unless there was quite complex automatic caching going on behind the scenes. E.g. If you used image width and height, they'd both need to be calculated separately. OTOH, asking for the existing image metadata object will fill everything in at once and then let you use all of those things without further calculations or re-opening the file.
But it could probably be done as part of the Item object, which could cache data for the file/folder it represents.
