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Component Presentations

A Component Presentation is a publishable piece of content that appears on a Web page. Components are combined with Component Templates during publishing to produce Component Presentations.

Components contain content without formatting or visual information and Component Templates contain code that specifies how the Component should be visualized and that may contain code to be executed (Component Template code can also contain Web application code).

When a user publishes a Component or Component Template, the Content Manager combines the two to produce a Component Presentation. Component Presentations therefore do not exist in the Content Manager except when a user previews content. Component Presentations have system metadata but they cannot have custom metadata.

Static Component Presentations
When you add a Component and a non-dynamic Component Template to a Page, the two are combined into a Component Presentation and added to the Web page before publishing takes place. The advantage of Static Component Presentations is that they speed up your Web site because a file is retrieved at request time. The disadvantage is that it slows down publishing, duplicates content, makes dynamic assembly of the Web page impossible, creates the risk of stale content and an inconsistent Web site, makes dynamic link resolving impossible, and takes up disk space.
Dynamic Component Presentations
When you add a Component and dynamic Component Template to a Page, the two are combined into a Component Presentation and published and stored separately from the Web page. The published Web page contains code to retrieve the Component Presentation at request time.
The advantage of dynamic Component Presentations is that they speed up publishing, makes dynamic link resolving possible, eliminates the risk of stale content or an inconsistent Web site, and uses less disk space. However, using Dynamic Component Presentations require a faster Web server and/or faster access to the published Component Presentations.