Crawling a Content Folio
- by Kyle Hatlestad
Content Folios in WebCenter Content allow you to assemble, track, and access a logical group of documents and/or links. It allows you to manage them as just a list of items (simple folio) or organized as a hierarchy (advanced folio). The built-in UI in content server allows you to work with these folios, but publishing them or consuming them externally can be a bit of a challenge.
The folios themselves are actually XML files that contain the structure, attributes, and pointers to the content items. So to publish this somewhere, such as a Site Studio page, you could perhaps use an XML parser to traverse the structure and create your output. But XML parsers are not always the easiest or most efficient to use.
In order to more easily crawl and consume a Content Folio, Ed Bryant - Principal Sales Consultant, wrote a component to do just that. His component adds a service which does all the work for you and returns the folio structure as a simple resultset. So consuming and publishing that folio on a Site Studio page or in your portal using RIDC is a breeze!
For example, let's take an advanced Content Folio example like this:
If we look at the native file, the XML looks like this:
But if we access the folio using the new service - http://server/cs/idcplg?IdcService=FOLIO_CRAWL&dDocName=ecm008003&IsPageDebug=1 - this is what the result set looks like (using the IsPageDebug parameter).
Given this as the result set, it makes it very easy to consume and repurpose that folio.
You can download a copy of the sample component here. Special thanks to Ed for letting me share this component!
