Can I use DROID base code and update it so that I can capture more technical metadata? Additionally, can I also add few fields for users to manually key in the data for DROID to generate a CSV output that will have standard DROID fields + extra technical metadata + manual inputted fields. Firstly can I do that? If yes, are there any cautions I have to take other than version mismatch?

[Shindsac]

I am looking to extract more than persistent technical metadata

[sparkhi]

All the Droid module binaries are available in maven central if you wish to extend as an application using Droid's core functionality.
If you intend to add into the core functionality, it would be slightly different approach.

Could you please give examples of which additional metadata you would like to capture?

[Shindsac]

Thank you for quick response. I am looking to add the below fragile tech metadata:

DATE CREATED
DATE ACCESSED
DATE LAST SAVED
LAST SAVED BY
AUTHORS
OWNER
COMPANY
COMPUTER

All the Droid module binaries are available in maven central if you wish to extend as an application using Droid's core functionality. If you intend to add into the core functio ality, it would be slightly different approach.

Could you please give examples of which additional metadata you would like to capture?

[sparkhi]

Droid is open source, so you could take a look at the code and modify it.
If you simply intend to consume one or more modules of Droid as a dependency, write your own application on top of it, that's absolutely fine.
If you intend to contribute changes to core, that's welcome too, but it would be reviewed with a view of whether the changes are in-line with Droid's intended direction and if they are, we would be happy to make it into the product.

If you simply want a few fields with constant values added to the export CSV, we are working on something similar which would be released in the next iteration pretty soon.

[steve-daly]

Where people have similar requirements to this, the most common simple approach is to run DROID from the command line, and also run a tool such as Apache Tika which can extract the parameters you mention, and/or also other tools such as MediaInfo. These different reports can then be merged programmatically (e.g. using Python or SQLite) to create a single output file as desired. You would probably find that easier than extending the core functionality of DROID as it's a complex application to work with. As @sparkhi says, the next version of DROID will allow creation of custom templated outputs (e.g. with additional columns) but won't be able to populate these automatically with additionally extracted parameters.