sections in the article
This article describes how Channels are managed in Plan & Release.
About channels
A Channel is an organized collection of entities that you want to publish. Channel is a basic inriver concept and it's also the name of an entity type with built-in support in inriver.
Channel structure
Typically, you organize your entities in a hierarchical tree structure of ChannelNode entities. The Channel entity will be the root node of the tree. Most types of entities can then be placed in the channel by linking entities to the channel nodes. (Exceptions are some entity types with special built-in purposes in inriver like Channel, Publication, and Section.)
Publishing information
After finishing the enrichment process, your entities are ready to be published to your consuming systems. It includes all communication channels where you want to present your marketing information, both attracting channels (catalogs, brand sites, campaigns, CMS etc.) and converting channels (eCommerce, stores, mCommerce, etc.).
Connectors
The channel itself is just a way to organize data, it doesn't include any information about where to send the data. By associating the channel with a connector, you decide how and where to publish it. There are pre-built standard connectors, called adapters, for common platforms and formats but you can also build your own connectors.
Plan & Release
You work with channels in Plan & Release. Below is an example of a channel called Fashion and a structure of Channel Nodes (Clothes, Accessories).
Populating Channels with Entities
You can add Entities to your Channels using one of two basic strategies. You can mix the strategies between channel Nodes but a single channel Node can only support one of the strategies:
- Manually link Entities to channel Nodes.
- Associate a channel Node with a query or a set of link rules. Then you don't need to manually link your Entities. The queries and link rules will automatically link the Entities to the channel Nodes in the background, as soon as the Entities match the rules of a channel Node.
Read more about working with Channels in Plan & Release in this article.
Filtering Channel content
You can use channel filters to set up conditions for when an entity is published. This means that an entity can be part of the channel but still not get published. This is a very convenient way to put an entity in the channel at any time but wait to publish it until the entity reaches a certain level of enrichment and approval before being published.
Publishing for Print
inriver Print is an application used for working with publishing for print directly to Adobe inDesign®. When setting up a channel for print, you use two special entity types, Publication and Section, with built/in support in inriver Print. Those entity types correspond closely to Channel and ChannelNode.
Most of the general information about channels and channel nodes above applies equally to the corresponding entities Publication and Section.
Read more about inriver Print in this article.
Working with Channels in the Remoting API
There is a dedicated part of the Remoting API called ChannelService that contains a set of methods to work with Channel-related functionality.
Read about the IChannelService interface and all available methods including links to code examples in this article.
Further reading
Restyled inriver Plan & Release: creating and managing channels
Comments
0 comments
Please sign in to leave a comment.