Selecting Assets

You can configure Asset Publisher to select assets manually or dynamically through various criteria. Within those options there is flexibility in what assets are displayed and how they are displayed.

Selecting Assets Manually

To enable manual asset selection,

1. Click the click the Options icon () in the application’s menu.

2. Select Configuration from menu.

3. In the Asset Publisher configuration, select Manual from the select box beneath Asset Selection sets.

Now you must select a Scope and specific Asset Entries from that scope to display. You can configure multiple scopes, including the global scope, from which to select assets.

Figure 1: Selecting assets in the Asset Publisher manually is similar to selecting assets in the Web Content Display application except that you can select assets of any type, not just web content. You can also add scopes to expand the list of assets that are available to be displayed in the Asset Publisher.

When selecting assets manually, a list of configured scopes appears under the Scope heading. You can configure scope like this:

1. Click the X button at the right to remove a scope from the list.

2. Click the Select button to add additional scopes to the Asset Publisher’s configuration.

3. After you’ve added a scope, a new Select button appears under the Asset Entries heading. A list of assets selected for display appears in the Asset Entries section. You can select assets to be displayed by clicking the appropriate Select button. One button appears for each configured scope. By default, these are the available asset types:

   • Blogs Entry
   • Bookmarks Entry
   • Bookmarks Folder
   • Calendar Event
   • Basic Document
   • Google Docs
   • Contract
   • Marketing Banner
   • Online Training
   • Sales Presentation
   • Documents Folder
   • Dynamic Data Lists Record
   • Message Boards Message
   • Basic Web Content
   • Web Content Folder
   • Wiki Page

   You can select any number of assets to be displayed. Note, however, that there’s a display setting called Number of Items to Display that determines the maximum number of items to display (or, if pagination is enabled, the maximum number of items to display per page). The Asset Publisher can mix and match different asset types in the same interface.

4. When you’re done selecting items to display, click Save. Any selected assets are added to the list of assets that are displayed by the application.

Once you have your content selected, you can configure the display types to configure how the content appears. We’ll discuss the display settings in more detail after we finish discussing how to select assets for display.

Manual asset selection lets you select assets of various types from different scopes, but it can be time-consuming to update the assets that should be displayed. It’s often more convenient to use the Asset Publisher to select content dynamically.

Selecting Assets Dynamically

The Asset Publisher’s default behavior is to select assets dynamically according a set of customizable rules. These rules can combined so that they compliment each other to create a nice, refined query for your content. Assets are filtered by permissions automatically, no matter how complicated your asset selection rules are. You have the following rule types:

Scope: Choose the sites containing the content that should be selected. This works the same way as with manual asset selection: assets can only be displayed if they belong to a configured scope. The following scope options are available:

• Current Site
• Global
• Other Site

The Other Site scope option is unavailable for Asset Publisher applications configured on a page template (e.g., Content Display Page).

Asset Type: Choose the asset types you want, from all assets, to only one, or any combination in between. For example, you could choose only web content, only wiki entries, or any combination of multiple types.

Filter: Add as many filters on tags or categories as you like. You can choose whether the content must contain or must not contain any or all of the tags or categories that you enter.

Figure 2: You can filter by tags and categories, and you can set up as many filter rules as you need.

Once you’ve set up your filter rules for dynamically selecting content, you can decide how the content is displayed.

If you’ve added custom User profile attributes, you can configure the Asset Publisher to display assets that match them. This setting retrieves assets that have matching categorization. These categories must be from the global context. For example, suppose a User has a custom field called Location with the type Text. If this attribute is set to Moon, you could create a vocabulary called Location and a category for the Location vocabulary called Moon. Then you could categorize content with Moon in the Location vocabulary. With this organizational setup, adding an Asset Publisher and specifying Location as the Asset Publisher’s custom user attribute would only display content that had been categorized as Moon. Pretty cool, right?

See Defining Categories for Content for further information.

In addition, you can use these advanced filters:

• Show only assets with Welcome as its display page displays only assets specifically configured for the Welcome page.
• Include tags specified in the URL? lets you specify tags in the URL for the Asset Publisher to display.

The Ordering and Grouping section of the Asset Publisher precisely controls how content is ordered and grouped when displayed. You can order the assets displayed by Asset Publisher in ascending or descending order by the following attributes:

• Title
• Create Date
• Modified Date
• Publish Date
• Expiration Date
• Priority

Say you have a series of “How To” articles that you want displayed in descending order based on whether the article was tagged with the hammer tag. Or suppose you want a series of video captures to appear in ascending order based on a category called birds. For these use cases, you can configure the ordering and grouping settings.

You can also configure a second ordering. The second ordering is applied to any assets for which the first ordering wasn’t sufficient. For example, if you ordered assets by title and there are multiple assets with the same title, the second ordering takes effect, perhaps the publication date.

You can establish grouping rules as well as ordering rules. You can group assets by type or by vocabulary. For example, suppose you have a vocabulary called Membership Type with two categories: Premium and Regular. If you group assets by Membership Type, all assets with the Premium category appear in one group and all assets with the Regular category appear in another group. Grouping rules are applied before any ordering rules: they’re a way to divide up the displayed assets into separate lists. The ordering rules are applied separately to each group of assets.

Note that grouping and ordering rules are only one way to control how your content appears. You can refine the display through many other display settings which you’ll examine next.

Note: The following actions have immediate effects in your Asset Publisher:

• Change the value of the Asset Selection option.
• Change the value of the Scope option.
• Select, add, sort or delete asset entries (only when selecting assets manually).

Other changes happen after clicking Save. Next you’ll learn about the Asset Publisher’s other configuration options.