Creating content-objects

Creating custom content objects, more specific to your business needs

Section(s): data model, learning

What is a content object ?

A content objectis a content that has a detail page on your site (article, category, product...) as we don't know your site, we provide common ones (as article) but feel free to add as many as you need.

contentobject - description

The contentobject is the base object you should always copy for creating specific content objects for your needs. It contains properties needed for handling correctly multisite, multilang, versioning, autopublish, autoarchive, seo issues.
here is the content object structure as it is provided with the current version of WMS.

Properties description

name	type	nature	description
id	identity	identity	Engine native property
created	date (new)		Engine native property
modified	date (new)		Engine native property
owner	child	user	Engine native property
parent	sentence		Engine native property
child	word		Engine native property
status	child	workflowstandard	Engine native property
name	sentence		Engine native property
activated	child	activated	Engine native property
copietravail	child	contentobject	required for versioning
uid	word		required for versioning
version	integer		required for versioning
lang	child	lang	required for mulilang (translations)
media	child	media	required for multisite (multisite)
publishdate	datetime		required for autopublication
archivedate	datetime		required for autoarchive
reftitle	sentence		required for seo
refkeywords	text		required for seo
refdescription	text		required for seo
master	word		required for multilang and multisite content sharing
refurl	sentence		required for seo
mediagroup	child	mediagroup	required for multisite content sharing
sharegroup	child	activated	required for multisite content sharing
separator_publisharchive	word
alertparam	cjhild	alertparam

It is recommended to keep all of these properties unless you're sure you will never need them (who said never ?). Even if you are in a multisite or multilang context, you should keep using multisite and multilang properties as you might want to handle those issues in the future.

multisite issues

Copying the content object should be enough to get a preview button on the dataview action of an object. However, when your platform handles very different kind of sites, you might also need to change the content definition of your site (media object) / sitemodel/ sitegroup (mediagroup). Have a look to those objects and to multisite articles for more details.

Front actions

Now you've created a new content object, but you're job is not exactly done, you have to handle this in FO.
Open the /SAN/__perso/front/common/init/initBaseWhere/initBaseWhere_content.jsp file.
This JSP initializes SQL bases for querying objects. For secutrity reasons, objects for which nothing has been specified will have a 0=1 constraint. That way, we are sure malicious people from seing private datas.
The JSP is then divided in two sections.
one is handling non preview queries, the other for preview queries.
If you created a foo object, you will have to define basewhere_view_foo in live and preview contexts. Look how others are created, it will give you an idea on how initializing them.

Once you're finished, you should have a preview button leading to a default template. Jump to the create template article to go on...