Assets and media

This document provides an introduction to asset and media management in EPiServer Commerce. The EPiServer platform has an asset management system supporting generic content-based files, which is used by EPiServer products such as CMS and Commerce. Assets are made available in the Edit user interface from the Assets pane, for instance blocks and media files in CMS, and the product catalog in Commerce. Media files can be for instance images, videos and documents.

The EPiServer platform content model and asset management is described in more detail in the Content section of the EPiServer CMS SDK. The Commerce-specific parts of the assets management integration are described here in the Commerce SDK.

Asset management in Commerce

By default the new content-based asset management system with the BLOB provider model  is used for adding assets to the catalog nodes and entries when manging catalogs. All files are stored in the same location as the EPiServer CMS files, providing a more unified user experience.

In a Commerce installation, products and product variants from the product catalog can be accessed from the Catalogs gadget in the Assets pane, with general support for drag and drop of content items into CMS pages and blocks. The integration is done using content type classes EPiServer.Commerce.Catalog, EPiServer.Commerce.Catalog.ContentTypes and EPiServer.Commerce.Catalog.Provider.

Configuration of asset management system

The configuration setting UseLegacyAssetSystem specifies the asset management system to be used, if set to "true" the legacy ECF asset system in Commerce Manager will be used. If the legacy ECF asset system is used, the "Assets" tab in the catalog editing UI will be removed. The setting is configured as follows in the web.config files of both the Commerce Manager and the front-end sites:

 <appSettings>
  <add key="UseLegacyAssetSystem" value="" />
  
</appSettings>

Using the assets API in Commerce

• Use AssetServiceDatabase to handle save, edit, and delete to the CatalogItemAsset table. The assetKey used is now ContentGuid from EPiServer asset file.
• Use CommerceMedia and CommerceMediaCollection to store asset data on a product page.
• Use CommerceMediaCollectionEditorDescriptor, and CommerceMediaCollectionEditor.js and model on client, to support edit, delete and management of assets.
• Use the assets migration tool (see EPiServer World) to migrate the old ECF asset system to the new EPiServer asset system.
• Update the AssetImporter to handle importing of both the old ECF asset system and the EPiServer CMS content-base asset system.

See also

Refer to the sections listed below for more detailed information

• Content section of the EPiServer CMS SDK.
• Assets and media section of the EPiServer CMS SDK.
• Blob providers section of the EPiServer CMS SDK.
• Assets Importer section of the EPiServer Commerce SDK.