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Question

Metadata Cascade Policy not working

  • May 22, 2025
  • 4 replies
  • 59 views

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Hi Box Support team,

 

I have tried to use the Metadata Cascade Policy feature, and it appears to not work. I know that the documentation says the cascade does not happen immediately, but even for a small folder tree my templates have not cascaded after 10 hours.

Use case:

Created a new folder to represent business models, each folder has its own metadata instance of a shared template, and has just 5 subfolders beneath it. In testing, each of the subfolders is empty. Then, metadata cascade policy is enabled by using the Java SDK (https://github.com/box/box-java-sdk/blob/master/doc/folders.md#create-cascade-policy-on-folder)

Observed results: Out of 20 folders created, only one folder had all 5 of its subfolders get the metadata cascaded to them. For the others, between 0-4 subfolders will have the metadata cascaded, even after waiting 10 hours. There seems to be no pattern of which subfolders get the metadata cascaded to them successfully.

Some help on expectations around this feature would be helpful. This seems like a very simple use case and am surprised it is so flaky for this simple folder structure.

Thank you,

- Brooke Xu

4 replies

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Hi, could I receive some help with this?

Thanks


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I have the same problem. We've built a whole filing system based on cascading metadata (because we can't get a Digital Asset Management system), and it's extremely disappointing that it's not working when we are actually putting it into practice. Also disappointing that no one has been able to answer this in a year's time. Did you ever put in a support ticket? Wondering if that's our next step.


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Hello! I am about to have my agency utilize Box.com as a DAM needing this very specific feature. I have tested and have found similar issues when trying to enable the cascade policy and is concerning seeing similar issues happening to others. I hope they were able to fix it for you. I'm still experimenting to see if it is user error, but my fear is that it is not. Was this ever resolved? 426513487422130769033


mfb-brian
  • New Member
  • March 6, 2026

I am finding the same issue. Some cascading folders’ images ran the META template, and others did not. I thought it was based on specific users, but this ia not the case when I can find folders created by these Users elsewhere and the cascade worked properly.

Any help with this issue would be great. We are also turing Box into our DAM and need all of our images to have searchable META data.