Documentation Center

Publishing Overview

Content is published into Content Delivery to be viewed by your end users. As it is published, it passes through a two step process: Upload and then Prepare. Within Content Delivery, Prepare refers to the process of indexing XML content, resolving references and links and making the content ready for consumption by your end users.

System Overview

Upload

The following describes the process of uploading content into Content Delivery and its characteristics:

  1. Content is uploaded into the holding area. You may upload content into the holding area at different times. During the Upload step, the publication is locked. Other processes, such as a Prepare, cannot be started while a publication is locked.
  2. Content is stored in the holding area until a Prepare is completed. Content in the holding area is not accessible to end users for viewing or searching.
  3. When uploading updated content into a previously Prepared publication, the newly updated content is stored in the holding area until a Prepare is completed. Therefore, the original content is still accessible for view and search by your end users, and the updated content waits in the holding area for a Prepare.

Prepare

If you are preparing a new version of an existing publication, the application maintains high availability of your existing content, allowing your end users to continue to search and view the existing content while Prepare readies the updated content. During Prepare, any content being modified by the process is stored in the holding area. At the sixth step, the updated content is moved into the live area, and becomes available to your end users.

The following describes the publication Prepare process within Content Delivery. Assuming a DITA publication, Prepare performs the following actions in sequence:

  1. The publication is locked for Prepare's exclusive access. Other processes, such as Upload, cannot be run while a publication is locked.
  2. Content references (conrefs, conref pushes, conref pulls, conref ranges, and keyrefs) are resolved.
  3. An index is built which lists all of the topics and their fully resolved metadata. For example, if a topic's title is modified by a conref, this information will be stored within the index.
  4. A fully resolved table of contents is built from the map. This step resolves all the topic navigation, titles, and short descriptions into the table of contents.
  5. The remaining set of references are resolved which includes adding titles and short descriptions to all cross references, and building related links tables (resolving reltables) within individual topics.
  6. All content in the holding area is moved into the live area and becomes available to the end users for searching and viewing. Up until this point, all of the content preparation has occurred within the holding area. During this step, the content is indexed by Lucene.
  7. The publication metadata is updated and the index term list for the publication is built.
  8. The publication is unlocked and Prepare completes.
  9. The publication is made visible (if option was checked). Otherwise, this step must be performed manually.

If the Prepare process fails for any reason, the step on which it fails determines the state of the publication after failure. If the Prepare process fails in the first five steps, all of the updated content is still in the holding area. If Prepare fails after the sixth step, all updated content has been moved to the live area and is available for your end users to view and search.

Revisions

The Upload and Prepare processes allow you to update a publication by uploading only the content that has changed into the holding area, and then executing a Prepare. Content Delivery maintains high availability for a publication that is being Prepared a second time, allowing users to view and search the original content even as the new content is loaded, readied, and moved into the live area.

It is beneficial to continue to revise the same publication as opposed to creating new publications on the system. Your end users who may have established bookmarks or shared links to topics with friends will attempt to return to the same publication they previously visited. If you create a completely new publication for a new revision, these stored links will point to the older version of the publication.

Deleting a Publication

If you delete a publication, it removes both the holding and the live area for that publication and removes all entries for that publication with the Lucene search index. At the time of deletion, the content can no longer be viewed or found in searches by end users.