sections in the article
This article provides an overview of the Plan & Release functionality in inriver.
About inriver Plan & Release
The Plan & Release functionality allows you to monitor the content sent to outbound channels and publications.
On the dashboard, you will find the following navigation menu options:
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Edit
Takes you to the channel where you can start working on it.
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Star entity
Creates a bookmark on the start page of Enrich and moves the channel first in the Plan & Release dashboard.
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Open in new tab
Opens the channel in Enrich in an entity overview, in a new tab.
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Open in enrich
Opens the channel in Enrich in an entity overview.
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Unpublish
Prevents the channel from being published via a connector.
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Delete
Removes the channel and all the links to its content.
You also have seamless access to your Tasks in the task widget.
Channels and publications
A Channel is basically an organized collection of entities that you want to publish. Entities are a core concept in an inriver solution. By associating a channel to an outbound connector, your product information will be published to different receiving systems.
A Publication is similar to a channel, except that the information will be set up for Print via an InDesign connector. Read more about the inriver Print Plugin in this article.
Both Channel and Publication entities are created in inriver and support FieldTypes and LinkTypes the same way as other entities.
You can create a new channel or publication in the top navigation toolbar.
Channels overview
Channel completeness
Selecting a channel brings you to the Channel completeness tab. From here you can easily view the channel readiness, also known as completeness.
Channel structure
Selecting the Structure tab on the channel is where you manage channel nodes in a selected channel. They can be added, moved, or removed.
In the field to the left, you can open a work area just like in Enrich or quick search. This is very useful when populating a channel.
In the field to the right, you can manually add products or create link rules/queries to build out the channel node.
To leverage the full potential of your inriver solution, it is important to create a Data model that makes product enrichment both easy and efficient. Plan & Release lets you build a channel structure that supports the way an outbound system expects to consume the product information. If your channel structure is large, use the filter search box to find different channel nodes.
Avoid having large numbers of Entities in a Channel Node. The number of Entities within each Channel Node must be less than 2000. The performance will significantly reduce as the number of Entities within Channel Nodes increases.
Contact inriver for guidance if you have a requirement that needs this approach.
When working with a channel you can utilize the entity toolbar at all times. The options are:
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Star entity
Creates a bookmark of the channel on the start page of Enrich and moves the channel first in the Plan & Release dashboard.
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Edit
Edits fields in a pop-up widget.
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Open details in enrich application
Takes a shortcut to Enrich where you find the selected channel in the entity overview.
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Lock Entity
Locks the entity so that no other user can work on it.
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System info
System info about the channel.
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Synchronize channel
See below.
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Rebuild channel
See below.
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Publish/Unpublish
Allows or prevents the channel from being published via a connector.
Rebuilding or synchronizing a channel
It is possible to rebuild or synchronize a channel when the structure or content is out of sync or corrupt. This is not something that you should do often.
You can read more about Missing channel nodes for instructions on how to rebuild or synchronize a channel.
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Synchronize Channel
Will try to resolve and rearrange the entities within a channel. If the structure is corrupt, this will not fix the problem and you will have to use Rebuild Channel.
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Rebuild Channel
Will completely remove the channel structure and build it up again from scratch, based on the actual links. This can take time and should be used with caution.
Warning: Do not run both jobs at the same time.
Rebuild channel structure should not be done in an extension. This could potentially lead to sync issues in your channels if you don't push out the updates to the channel. Rebuild channel structure should be used by exception and must only be done from the UI side.
Contact inriver for guidance if you have a requirement that needs this approach.
Rebuild Channel should not be part of a normal workflow. It is a disaster recovery method in case something goes wrong with a channel structure, and is a large and time-consuming process that causes performance loss for the system which will affect user experience.
Contact inriver for guidance if you have a requirement that needs this approach.
Video tutorial
Further reading
Linking many entity types to a channel node
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