Published Components

Components are published alone as standard JSON data with templateless, data-only publishing or as Component Presentations with template-based publishing.

Components alone as JSON data

For templateless, data-only publishing, Components are published in standard JSON format to the destination specified by the Target Type. On the receiving end, a Content Deployer indexes it for searching (optional), and stores the data.

Components can be published as long as the selected Schema has the following option selected: Enable each Schema field to be made publishable when authors publish an item based on this Schema. This setting makes the Component publishable when you publish the Component itself or any Content Manager item that includes the Component as a resolved item.

Component Presentations

If the legacy, template-based publishing is also used, Components can be published only as part of a Component Presentation, that is with a Component Template. They are published as one of the following, depending on the type of Component Template:

  • A static Component Presentation that is published as embedded content on a published Page.
  • A dynamic Component Presentation, which is separate item and not part of the Page. The Page includes a line of code that retrieves the appropriate content. Once published, this content can be retrieved by the medium of choice.
    You can publish Dynamic Component Presentations as:
    • XML fragments — structured text fragments that contain content but no formatting. (Note that the term "components" does not refer to Content Manager Components.)
    • HTML fragments — fragments that contain both content and markup.
    • Plain text fragments — fragments that contain both content and markup.
    • JSP, ASP or ASP.NET fragments — scripted fragments.
Components published because of Component links

Both regular Components and Multimedia Components can include links to other Components or Multimedia Components. Such links can trigger the publishing or republishing of other items, which can happen either by publishing the item that includes the link or by publishing the item that is identified in the link, in other words, in both directions.

Take, for example, Component A that includes a Component Link field that points to Component B.
  • If you publish Component A, it can trigger publishing Component B as well, and possibly further linked items in Component B and onward. By default, no Component Links are resolved, so Component B would not be published. How deeply the Publisher service goes when resolving links depends on how publishing is implemented. For more information, refer to the topic on the Publisher service.
  • In addition, if you publish Component B, it can trigger the publishing Component A that links to it. This is actually the default behavior, which users can change at the time they publish Component B by selecting the following option on the Advanced tab of the Publish window: If other published Components link to a Component you are publishing, publish or republish those Components. Note, however, if you unpublish a Component, Components that link to that Component are not unpublished. You can change default behavior using the Event System. For more information, see the TOM.NET API reference documentation.