Is it a good idea to publish ECL Stub Component but not the content of the multimedia item?

Question

1. We are in the following scenario :

   • We have created an ECL provider which implements the GetDirectLinkToPublished method from the IContentLibraryMultimediaItem interface --> no binary content to publish in the Broker
   • A dedicated TBB is in charge of ECL items resolution in Rich Text fields & Component Link fields.

All is working well.

2. Now, on the Delivery side, we need to do dynamic queries (brokers) based on multimedia metadatas. According to Bart's article (very clear), the simplest solution is to add these metadatas to stub components during publishing and of course to publish these stub components.

Well let's do this. But as we don't need to publish binary content, the TBB will only add metadatas.

So finally, on the Broker side we have "stub component records" in the ITEM table and in the COMPONENT table but no associated record in BINARY tables (BINARY, BINARY_CONTENT, BINARYVARIANTS) although the field BINARY.IS_MULTIMEDIA is set to 1.

My question : could this situation lead to data integrity/consistency issue ? A multimedia component with no binary content on the broker side ?

Please do not hesitate to share your opinion!

Answer 1

If the GetDirectLinkToPublished method returns a result, then there is no need for ECL to publish the item. This is a bit strange when you publish the ECL item to the Broker as a Dynamic Multimedia Component Presentation. But keep in mind, in the Broker we always store a Component Presentation, so a Template fragment, which can use the direct URL rather than reference the binary content.

I didn't do anything special in teh scenario I discussed in the article you mentioned. My ECL Provider returned null for the GetContent method and GetDirectLinkToPublished and GetTemplateFragment were implemented returning a correct result. SO combine that with the default ECL TBB, I'm not actually sure if there was binary content published to teh Broker, I never really checked it. The scenario worked as described.