We will soon release a set of improvements to how Box Extract manages folder-level extraction, bringing greater flexibility, reliability, and control to Custom Extract Agents. These changes lay the groundwork for more scalable and conflict-free metadata extraction across your content in Box.
Soon, users will be able to to apply Custom Extract Agents created in Box Extract to folders and subfolders to automatically extract structured data from both parent and subfolders at the same time, and apply that data as metadata in Box. Currently, Custom Extract Agents created in Box Extract can only be applied to parent folders to automate data extraction at scale. With this new feature, customers will be able to leverage Custom Extract Agents to automatically add metadata to existing files or new files added to a folder and its subfolders simultaneously, allowing a single Extract Agent to automatically process files across all nested subfolders, and eliminating the need to configure separate agents for every subfolder. Users will be able to view which subfolders a specific Custom Extract Agent is applied to, including the file types that are affected, the event type that triggered the extraction process, and the extraction policy for those subfolders.
Moreover, extraction processes on files that already live in the folders will no longer be constrained by a per-folder file cap, enabling agents to process entire folder contents at scale.
To improve reliability and reduce configuration errors, Custom Extract Agents will include built-in conflict detection. If users attempt to apply a Custom Extract Agent to a folder with an existing Custom Extract Agent using the same metadata template, they will be presented with the option of keeping existing metadata values or overriding those values within the parent folders and subfolders.
This release also introduces a set of guardrails to protect Custom Extract Agent configuration integrity:
- Metadata templates will be locked once source folders are attached to an agent, preventing accidental redundancies with Custom Extract Agent configuration.
- Users will be required to add and save a metadata template before attaching source folders, ensuring Custom Extract Agents are always in a valid state before extraction begins.
Stay tuned to learn more about this release.