Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Related Content Component

Oracle UCM or I should start calling it WebCenter Content,  provides a number of add on components which can be used to mix and match to suit once requirements. These components uses core UCM services and provides additional functionality.  Related Content Component is one such component. This Component allows contents to relate to each other. There are few out of the box relations that can used to relate contents. Below are few limitation that one should be aware of.

  • One cannot do bulk activities around relations, It does allow linking a number of child contents to a given parent in one go, but when you want to un-link you have go with one element at time.
  • It does not allow users to add additional information of the established relation. Lets say we have established relations between Content A and Content B when we look into the relation we have only what  type of relation it is. We cannot add any thing more to it.
  • Replicating relations is a bit tricky. Relations are stored in 'RelatedContent' table and one has to use table replication to replicate to our consumption server.
  • Since we are doing a table replication to consumption server we cannot preview Relations and then publish to live.
  • When we replicate parent contents related contents are not triggered for replication.
Let me know what are your use case for Related Content and challenges faced. May be we can log few enhancement requests

2 comments:

webmonkeymagic said...

I worked with an Oracle consultant on a client who had implemented RelatedContent on a largish website. It caused all sorts of issues and he logged several enhancement requests. It's been patched to meet a minimum level of functionality now but I would still rarely endorse using it, especially on a website. (Note it comes standard with URM.)

Prateek Mohan said...

I second webmonkeymagic on that!