As a content provider, you do not need to understand all of the details of the flex asset model. The purpose of this chapter is to help you develop a general understanding of this data model and how it relates to you as a content provider.
This chapter contains the following section:
As mentioned in Chapter 1, "Overview of WebCenter Sites," WebCenter Sites developers use two asset data models to create asset types and define how asset data is stored in the WebCenter Sites database: the basic asset model and the flex asset model.
The flex asset model is more complex than the basic asset model. Unlike basic assets, where the information for one instance of an asset is stored in one row of a database table, the information for one instance of a flex asset is stored in multiple database tables.
Whereas basic asset types are standalone asset types, flex asset types are composed of families of asset types. The members of a flex family are:
flex attribute type (required)
flex asset type (required)
flex definition (required)
flex parent (required)
flex parent definition (required)
flex filter type (optional)
The members of a flex family form an asset inheritance tree, where child assets inherit various attributes from their parents.
As a content provider, you will not directly work with all of the members of the flex family. In fact, you will mainly be working with flex assets, which are the key members of flex families (all of the other members of a flex family contribute to the flex asset in some way). If you have the appropriate permissions, you may also be responsible for creating new flex attributes, which are characteristics of flex assets.