Importing a group of HTML documents without losing relative hyperlinks

At my office we have a department website that hosts a desk manual. The desk manual is made up of about 50 HTML documents that are all linked together as a website. We would like to load this collection of HTML documents (or "webpage") into documentum, but our main concern is that we will lose the relatively associated hyperlinks. We are about to begin an effort to convert all the existing hyperlinks to absolute links, linking on object_id. Can anyone think of a better way to achieve this goal with less effort? Or does anyone know if there is setup that will allow us to navigate a collection of HTML files within Documentum as a seemless website? Any help or creative ideas are appreciated.

Thanks!

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scottmark

Have a look at "Virtual Link Support" it allows you to do exactly what you want without making any changes. This is not its main use case and is not very efficient but it does work.

Mark

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scottmark

Have a look at "Virtual Link Support" it allows you to do exactly what you want without making any changes. This is not its main use case and is not very efficient but it does work.

Mark

rwsanders

This looks helpful, but I am having trouble finding information on 'Virtual Link Support'. A good description of what it does and a procedure for enabling it would help out a bunch.

Thanks.

stephanemarcon

Hi,

You'll find information about the virtuallink support in the WDK Development guide.

Regards,

Stephane

XdctmX

Takea look at DRL component if you are using any WDK clients like Webtop.

XdctmX

Do you know the difference between a Documentum Virtual Link (VL) and a Documentum Resource Locator (DRL)?

Virtual Link versus DRL

Similarity:

At the end of the day, both types of URLs can be used to locate content in the repository, after authentication, and deliver it to the client.

Differences:

Syntax Difference
------------------------------

DRL is ID based. e.g. http://host:port/dam/drl/objectId/09a39032d54343/format/pdf

VL is Path based e.g. http://host:port/dam/cabinent1/folderA/folderB/myDoc.pdf

The major impact here is in support for relative links inside documents.

If you use VL and the document served up has relative links, these links will point back to the VL handler and will be able retrieve content themselves [if it exists in that location in the repository]

Example: If myDoc.pdf had relative links inside it for "folderC/myRelatedDoc.pdf", these would be interpreted by the browser as http://host:port/dam/cabinent1/folderA/folderB/folderC/myRelatedDoc.pdf which is a VL itself and will return myRelatedDoc.pdf if it exists in the specified repository path.

For DRLs this does not work, obviously...
http://host:port/dam/drl/objectId/09a39032d54343/format/pdf/folderC/myRelatedDoc.pdf will not return myRelatedDoc.pdf

Functional Difference
---------------------

DRLs use WDK Actions/Content Transfer Components (either HTTP or UCF mode) to deliver content to the browser.
VLs have their own mechanism to transfer content - using IDfSysObject.getFile() and streaming content back to the browser.

DRLs leave the user logged into DAM UI on completion (with anonymous accounts this is configurable).
VLs just deliver the content. The user is not left logged into DAM UI after the content is delivered.

DRLs can point to Folders, Inbox Tasks (enabled partially by the point above) and in future other DAM locations VLs cannot (again, due to the fact that they just deliver content)

VL came from RightSite support. It's main value add is the relative link support described above [anonymous access used to be a + also before it was added to DRL ]. DRLs are better in the sense that they go through the same route [Actions, Components etc.. ] to retrieve their content as the regular APP.

What is meant by relative links?
---------------------

They are relative links in the real sense...as you would expect them to be in HTML documents for e.g. <a href="images/smileyface.gif">. That is what makes VL powerful (it's used a lot by WebPublisher). It lets you have say a website folder structure on your hard-drive, import it into a repository, and have all the links still work when you access any page using a VL.

So, if I access http://host:port/dam/cabinet1/folderA/folderB/file.html and it has the HTML code above for an image, the image will be retrieved through the VL handler from the repository also

XdctmX

You can find information on how to configure VL support in the WDK Deployment Guide - Take a look at page 52 of this Docuemnt -https://powerlink.emc.com/nsepn/webapps/btg548664833igtcuup4826/km/live1//en_US/Offering_Technical/Technical_Documentation/300-009-297.pdf

lastnitescurry

thanks Rijo for a great post. I did not ask the question but will be book marking your answer..... Had been wondering what the virtual link war file was for.