Once all the content for the website has been created in Documentum Docbase, a big milestone has been achieved. The next big hurdle to overcome is to make all this content available to the website application (outside the Docbase) so that it can be displayed on the portals/websites. This raises a few questions:
- How difficult or easy is it to export the content (and obviously its associated metadata/properties) from Documentum Docbase to a target server and database repository so that web applications can easily query and display this information on websites?
- Do we need to write some custom code in order to publish/export the huge data set from Documentum Docbase to a file server and database?
- How do we execute this publishing code/utility to run at periodic intervals to ensure that new content entered in the Docbase or existing content that has been updated is seamlessly reflected on the website without much human intervention?
There could be a million other queries in your mind as well. Well, the answer is, you need not write any customized code or application to publish documents and their properties from Documentum Docbases. Documentum Site Caching Services provides an easy-to-configure and definitely extremely easy-to-use interface to set up publishing configurations for your Docbase.
For a quick reference, go through our earlier discussion on Site Caching Services and SCS Architecture in Chapter 4.
Documentum Site Caching Services (SCS) allows you to easily configure and publish documents and their properties (such as title, authors, keywords, custom added properties, etc.) from Docbase directly to the website host and database tables. By creating a Site Publishing Configuration in Documentum Administrator, you can specify which types of documents need to be published, from which Web Cabinet folder these documents need to be published, which properties need to be published along with the actual content files, which rendition formats of documents need to be exported, and many other parameters.
A Site Publishing Configuration publishes content from the Docbase if and only if the SCS software (both source and target) is installed correctly and the SCS services are up and running correctly.
There are some limitations of SCS and Site Publishing Configurations that you need to bear in mind when designing and planning your website. A few of these have been mentioned below:
- Only objects that are subtypes of
dm_sysobjectcan be published from Documentum Docbase.Note that objects such as users, groups, etc., which are subtypes of Persistent Object and not SysObject, cannot be published.
- Content needs to be first linked to the publishing folder in Docbase before it can be published.
- The total length of the Docbase path to the object, the object's name (
object_nameattribute), and the export directory on the SCS Source should not exceed 255 characters. This is a Windows limitation and does not hold good for UNIX servers. - On Windows servers, documents with the following characters in their file names cannot be published:
/ : * ? " < > |