Relate and Unrelate

Transcript

AEM related assets allows for a quick and easy way to establish relationships between any assets in AEM. This can range from establishing a source and derived relationship such as relating a source Photoshop file with image assets derive from it, or generic relationships like associating a license file with an asset it applies to. Relates is a flexible feature supporting many, many relationships allowing it to be used for a variety of use cases. So, to establish relationships between assets simply select one or more assets and tap relate.

This brings up three options, source which allows you to select assets that acts as the source of the select asset. So, for example, an InDesign asset might be selected as a source for a PDF or a Photoshop file as a source of an image or even multiple images that are all sources of a single composite image. Then there’s derived, which is the inverse of source. So, for example, a PDF may be derived from an InDesign asset or an image from a Photoshop file. And finally, other which indicates a less formal relationship, and you can really apply whatever semantics you might want to establish a logical connection between these assets. Since I’ve selected an image asset, let’s set a source and select the Photoshop file it was derived from. Note that these relationships can span the folder hierarchy of AEM assets. So, our Photoshop file may not be hierarchically close to the derived image asset, but we can still use this feature to create a nice clean link between the two.

Drilling [indistinct] properties, the relation, which is the source, as well as the related asset are displayed. We can even click on a related asset to open it directly.

So, after clicking on the link we’re now looking at the source. And in its properties, we see that this asset has been automatically assigned the derived asset relationship which makes sense because source and derived are simply different sides of the same coin. Now, after using relates the relationship between these assets is clearly articulated to AEM users via the related assets list.

I’ll open another asset that I’ve previously added a variety of relationships to. Opening these asset’s properties we can see all of its relationships which are grouped by the three types source, derived and other. Similar to source and derived, other relationships are set on the assets on both sides of the relationship. However, both are categorizes others since there’s no implicit direction in the other relationship.

Okay so now that we understand how to create and leverage relationships let’s take a look at how we can delete them if need be. To do this, we simply invoke the assets unrelate functionality. Opening this we see all the relationships organized by type and we can select as many as we want to unrelate.

And there we go now we’ve removed some of the asset’s relationships. -