This is a quick introduction to our new sub system called "Asset Library". It is designed to support a variety of different types of binary data. It will be included as part of our Enterprise version and design of it was driven by customer requests for unified way to store such data. The assets sub system can be used by other sub systems for instance to associates a set of images with a particular category or product. It can also be used to implement such functionality as secure software downloads.
The Asset Library is built using technology from our IBN product called "Business Application Foundation". It provides a very flexible way to configure custom fields that can be associated with a different types of binary data.
For example you might want to have width and height for images and author for PDFs. These properties can be auto populated when file is uploaded based on the file meta data.
Other features include:
- Provider based storage (you can decided how and where the files are stored based on file meta type, folder they are uploaded, size of the file and other attributes). By default file system and database storage providers are included.
- Provider based downloads (you can decide how the downloads are handled). By default there are 3 providers, IIS, Http Module and Http Handler. Please refer to out documentation wiki for more details.
- Provider based security. You can intercept requests for downloads and inforce some security checks. Especially usefull for subscriber based download implementations.
And many more features ...
More information can be found here:
http://docs.mediachase.com/doku.php?id=ecf:50:assets:introduction