Assets & Images
Product assets are files or links associated with a product, for example images, data sheets, manuals, etc Assets like these can be uploaded to your solutions and then associated with products, so they can be shown in frontend for browsing or download.
DynamicWeb 10 features two different tools for assigning assets to products:
- Asset Categories
- Image Patterns
Each of these tools have their pros and cons depending on how your product portfolio is organized, how your product assets are name, and what the intended use case is.
Asset Categories
Asset categories are typically used when you want to:
- Group assets under a label - like lifestyle - and control where they are shown based on that label
- Control how they inherit from a master product to variants or product family members.
By default you have a single system-wide asset category called Images with no inheritance defined, but you can create additional categories as described in the article linked above. If one of the inheritance modes is selected, assets added to that category are then inherited to all language versions and variants.
Read about managing assets on products here.
Auto-checkin
DynamicWeb 10 also supports automatically assigning assets to asset categories based on their file name. The only requirement is that the files must be consistently named and follow some sort of pattern, e.g. {ProductNumber}_datasheet or {ProductNumber}_lifestyle1.
To set this up:
- Upload assets to a folder on the solution
- On each asset category create the patterns used to assign images to that category
- Create two scheduled tasks:
- Use the Digital assets checkin on products-addin to place assign images
- Use the Cleanup missing digital assets-addin to remove references to assets which no longer exist
Image Patterns
Images patterns - occasionally known as alternative images - is a method for assigning images to products by auto-matching images from a folder to a product based on a pattern - e.g. /{ProductNumber_1.png).
This setup is ideal if you can make sure your images are consistently named and uploaded to your solution, and if you don't need to manually add and categorize different types of assets.
Image patterns are set on the channel using the Images tab.
Missing images
If a product or product group has no image you still want to avoid a broken image link in frontend. You can select a default missing image using the image options.