Merge assets

Overview

The function "Merge to one Asset" runs as a server action. Here, a selection of any number of more than one asset is allowed. One of these assets can be marked as the target asset, the remaining assets are then the source assets from which features, links, or master files are transferred to the target asset. What is transferred exactly, can be specified in detail via check boxes in a dialog box. In particular the following settings can be made.

Command name: "asset.aa-merge-asset-action"

Example

In a system where users are creating assets manually, duplicated are often generated, especially with images being imported multiple times. For systems that work with addresses or products, it still happens that such assets are slightly different but actually are duplicates. Such duplicates are sometimes triggered by typos or the use of different spellings.

The function be used in conjunction with the Duplicate search of censhare. This looks up all those assets during a nighttime job, which are most likely duplicates. These duplicates can then be resolved with the function "Merge to one Asset".

Configuration

The server action is located in the module "Asset Management"

Each feature attribute such as name, author or comments can remain in the target asset or a value of a particular source asset can be inherited. You can also determine that the master files of the target asset are replaced by those of a source asset. More specifically, in this case even the entire placement element tree, the planning element tree, all files with placement relations and placement element relations are replaced.
Furthermore, all asset relations are merged. That means that all child-/parent-asset relationships of all source assets are transferred to the target asset (unless the target asset already possesses such a child-/parent relationship of the same type between the same assets). An exception to this rule are only placement relations (see above) and those specified in the XML configuration, the so-called "single-relations". For these single relations it can be defined in the dialog to which asset they are to be transferred, similar to the features.

In the XML configuration, attribute features can be specified, which generally should not be transferred to the target asset and are therefore not listed in the dialog. Furthermore it can be stated here, which asset relations should be treated as single links. The following shows an example for these settings.

<merge>
      <exclude-features>
        <feature key="censhare:uuid"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.application"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.checked_out_by"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.checked_out_date"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.checked_out_inside_id"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.created_by"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.creation_date"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.currversion"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.deadline_actual"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.deadline_calc"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.deletion"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.edit-permission-key"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.first_actual_paging"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.first_paging"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.first_target_paging"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.id"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.id_extern"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.iscancellation"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.modified_by"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.modified_date"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.state"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.storage_state"/>
        <feature key="censhare:asset.wf_worst_state_id"/>
      </exclude-features>
      <single-relations>
        <single-relation name="parent_asset_rel" key="variant."/>
        <single-relation name="child_asset_rel" key="user.main-picture."/>
      </single-relations>
    </merge>

This function works well with:

Find Asset duplicates (advanced)