Variant management and targeting
Variants are one of the most sophisticated and unique features of the censhare system. The term Variant in censhare terminology describes basically the ability to branch an asset.
Overview
Variants are useful whenever an independent offspring of an asset is required, but the branched copy should retain some connection to its origin. There are plenty of uses for Variants, like technical variants (online and print variants of an image or text) or regional aspects of content.
A typical example is a text asset that gets translated into another language. For the translation it is mandatory to have a second independent asset, nevertheless, it is helpful to know the relation to the original text and whether the original text has changed or not. Actually, using the Variant architecture is a mandatory prerequisite for censhare’s language management system.
Variant types
censhare implements Variants in a very generic way. There are five types of Variants:
The Duplicate is a completely independent asset with its own id, metadata and file set. It was originally created as a copy of an existing asset. In the strong sense of the censhare terminology, the Duplicate is not considered a true Variant, although it has traces to its origin in the form of a relation.
The Variant without update flag is a full copy (metadata and files) of another asset but is otherwise independent in the system. It has its own unique asset id. When the Variant is created, a relation of type "Variant without update flag" is set between the Variant and its origin. This relation simply serves informational purposes - the Variant asset remembers its origin.
The Variant with update flag is basically the same as the Variant without update flag, with the difference, that every modification to the Master File of the original asset raises the content update flag for the variant. This is to notify the user that changes in the original have occurred.
The Layout geometry Variant – as the other Variants – also constitutes a full independent copy. Other than the Variant with update flag, it raises the layout update flag when its original has been modified and this flag is not solely for informational purpose but provides a mechanism where checking the flag replaces the Master File of the Variant with the modified Master File of the origin - eliminating the deviations that have occurred meanwhile to the Variant. This Variant is typically used for multi-language layouts (hence the term "Layout geometry Variant"), where a language Variant might experience minor language-specific adjustments, but when the entire layout concept of the origin has been re-worked, these language-specific changes are forgotten and reset to the new standard.
The Alias Variant is an independent copy of an original asset with its own metadata, but - and this is important to understand - Variant and original asset share the same file. If the Master File is modified, it makes no difference whether the modification was initiated from the Variant or the origin, both assets will point to the same modified file. This Variant behaves like an alias in the file system.
Variant handling
The censhare clients allow to create Variants of all types manually and the variant relations are visualized in a number of ways with icon or specific browser views in the asset query tables.
In a large, multi-language production environment, creating all the necessary variants between single layout, images and texts manually would be an impossible task, as virtually hundreds or thousands of relations of the different variant types have to be set up. For this purpose, the censhare Client provides a powerful tool "Duplicate Asset Structure", which allows to generate variant relations of all types down a hierarchy of assets automatically based on rules that take into account asset types, language codes and domains. Duplicate Asset Structure allows to rename variants automatically based on regular expressions, and can even preset preferences within InDesign-, InCopy- and XPress documents to resemble spell checking and hyphenation settings according to the language variant. In even more sophisticated scenarios it is possible to create hierarchical variants (a variant from a variant) and to reset the hierarchical variant relations with an update feature.