Association control element - Web Content Integrator

Association control element

The association element is used to create an association between two or more separate content items. It is used to support some content item relationships that are not native to Web Content Manager but which are found in some other web content management systems. One example would be a technical journal article which needs to include some data from one or more author biography content items.

An association element is tied to a text element. The value of the element in the feed is a comma-delimited list of GUIDs which represent the other external content items that are to be associated with the text element. When the Web Content Integrator processes the feed, it will attempt to resolve the GUIDs with the corresponding Web Content Manager items. A custom JSP component is then used in the presentation template to locate the linked content items at render time and display them in the context of the container content item.
Since this type of linkage is not a natural feature of Web Content Manager it relies on a custom JSP component for its implementation and there are some restrictions related to using an association element:

As Web Content Manager DocumentIds are used to create the association to the other content items, the format of the DocumentId is not guaranteed to be constant from version to version so there is some risk that the linkages could break following a Web Content Manager upgrade or migration

The referential integrity of Web Content Manager does not apply to association element links.

Element parameters: Details for this element:
Applies to item types Content
Required for item types None
Allowable Values A list of GUIDs that map to other feed entries which are linked to associated content items.
Required Attributes

name

The value of this attribute should match the name of an existing text element.

Optional Attributes None
Required sub-elements

type

The value of this sub-element must be "association". It is not case sensitive.

value

The value of this sub-element should be a comma-delimited list of GUIDs that point to the feed entries which are linked to associated content items.

Optional sub-elements None

Example:
<ibmwcm:element name="authors">
 <ibmwcm:type>association</ibmwcm:type>
  <ibmwcm:value>234ed298cf,7023bc23f1e</ibmwcm:value>
</ibmwcm:element>
Parent: RSS Namespace Extension for Web content

Element parameters:	Details for this element:
Applies to item types	Content
Required for item types	None
Allowable Values	A list of GUIDs that map to other feed entries which are linked to associated content items.
Required Attributes	name The value of this attribute should match the name of an existing text element.
Optional Attributes	None
Required sub-elements	type The value of this sub-element must be "association". It is not case sensitive. value The value of this sub-element should be a comma-delimited list of GUIDs that point to the feed entries which are linked to associated content items.
Optional sub-elements	None