Content Types

Content Type is a special kind of meta field. That's all. UCM puts a special emphasis on it as this is the value that differentiates a project plan from a web page and a team photo from a vendor invoice.

You may even choose to change the way your check-in and content info form looks — based on the type of the document.

Let's look how UCM handles Content Types.

Lab 3: Exploring content types

In Content Server go to Administration | Admin Applets.

Launch the Configuration Manager.

Select Options | Content Types... (as shown in the following screenshot):

The Content Types dialog opens. As you see, out of the box, Content Server has seven types — one for each imaginary department. This is a good way of segregating content. You can also go by the actual type of content. For instance, you can have one Content Type for Invoice and one for Project Plan.

They will also have different meta fields. For instance, an Invoice will have a Contract Number and a Total Amount. A Project Plan will have a project name and manager's name. Now let me show you how to add content types.

How to add a Content Type

It's easy to add a new Content Type. Just click on Add..., fill in the type name and the description. You can also select an icon for the new type.

What if you need to upload a new icon? Just make it into an 8-bit GIF file, 30x37 px, 96 dpi and upload it to:

C:\oracle\ucm\server\weblayout\images\docgifs

If your install path is different or you're not running on Windows then make appropriate corrections.

How to edit or delete a Content Type

The only thing to know about editing is that you can not really change the type name. All you can update is the icon or description.

If you're ready to delete a type then make sure there is no content in the repository that's using it. Either update it all or delete.

How would you go about doing a mass-update? I'll show you one of the ways in Chapter 10 on using Archiver.

And now let's proceed to Custom Metadata.