UCM Content Rule Side Effects
Content Profiles and Content Rules provide a mechanism for customizing a variety of pages within UCM. Generally just referred to as Profiles, you can conditionally configure/customize the check-in, update, search and information pages as relates to the context of the content and user intent.
One of the often used by seldom explained parts of Profiles is something called Side Effects. You will find the Side Effects tab on the Add/Edit Activation Conditions screen and it primarily allows you to accomplish two things:
- Add name/value pairs as IdocScript that will then get pushed to local data if the activation condition is true.
- Add custom IdocScript to a rule that is only evaluated if the activation condition is true and this can include logic like if and else statements or loops. Basically all IdocScript is possible here (though all of it may or may not be useful). As such, once a rule is activated, you can include logic, use includes from a component, etc.
What specifically might one use Side Effects for? For a simple example let’s pretend we have a profile for some scanned content. This content is checked in as an image based PDF (no OCR, no searchable text). Your profile should not display the full text search box in this case. There is no full text to be searched. You can accomplish this with a Side Effect in your profile:
<$SearchEngineName="DATABASE.METADATA"$>
Let’s take another example. Perhaps on the check-in page you want the alternate file field to be removed. You could go into config.cfg and add this setting, but it would be universal. More likely you want this to happen in a specific, conditional context. Try adding this as a Side Effect to your rule:
<$suppressAlternateFile="1"$>
Want more examples of Profiles, Rules and Side Effects? See below:
Jason Stortz
Jonathan Hult
Anton Bondar
