Documentation Center

Objects

Each publication is made of discreet document objects that are stored in the Content Manager repository.

Object-oriented content

Because content is created, stored and managed as modular objects, you are able to use them like building blocks to create multiple deliverables. You can easily change, restructure and re-use the content, achieve better collaboration when working on the content, and manage multiple versions of the same documents in parallel.

Document object types

Objects are classified into types according to the type of content they contain. Content authors work primarily with the following types of document objects:

Topic
A topic is intended to represent an independent, logical unit of information, which can be separately created, stored, managed, distributed and reused.
In more technical terms, the topic object is an XML file that contains textual content and possibly references to images.
Map
A map defines the logical order and the hierarchical relations of the topics it contains. In context of a publication, maps organize the topics into parts, chapters and sections. As such, the XML map may be compared to a table of contents (TOC).
In more technical terms, the map object is a DITA XML file that contains a list of links to topics and other maps. Maps do not contain any content of their own.
Image
An image object stores individual a graphical element separately from the topics in which it is used, which facilitates reuse. You add images to topics by inserting links to the image objects.
Similarly to the topic, it has an image title and possibly additional metadata.
In addition, you may also work with the following object types:
Publication
A publication is a compilation of independent, version-controlled objects from the Content Manager repository, which is combined with additional information that determines how the content should be assembled and published.
A publication exists in the repository as a Publication object and is the one object that contains all the other objects making up a given deliverable.
Library Topic
A library topic object is an XML file that contain blocks of content, smaller than a topic, which can be reused in other regular topics.
Other
A Other (Word, PDF, ...) object can be used to store various other types of files, such as PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, ZIP files, and so on.

Object relationships

A Topic contains textual content and possibly references to images:

Object properties and metadata

Metadata is data that describes other data. In Content Manager, this is information about the different types of objects. Content Manager stores a wide variety of metadata about the different object types to facilitate various features, such as search and reporting.

Some metadata gets generated automatically, such as , such as the time and date a topic was created or the name of last user to modify the topic. Other metadata is information that you must manually define by editing the object's properties. For example, you can add a description to explain how a particular topic should be used.

Each object has a Title that is defined in its properties. This title is the internal name of the object within the Content Manager repository.