Assets and media

This topic introduces asset and media management in Episerver Commerce. The asset management system supports generic, content-based files, which are used by Episerver products such as CMS and Commerce. Assets, such as blocks and media files in CMS, are located in Assets pane of the Edit user interface and the product catalog in Commerce. Media files are images, videos, and documents. See the Content  section of the Episerver CMS Developer Guide for information about the Episerver platform content model and asset management. This topic describes the Commerce-specific parts of the assets management integration.

Note: Entry-associated assets corresponding to the For this page folder in CMS are not available for Commerce. You can work with only shared assets for Commerce content.

Asset management in Commerce

The content-based asset management system with the BLOB provider model adds assets to the catalog nodes and entries when you manage catalogs. Files are stored in the same location as the Episerver CMS files, providing a unified user experience.

In a Commerce installation, you can access products and product variants from the product catalog via 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

Set the UseLegacyAssetSystem configuration setting in the web.config files of both the Commerce Manager and the front-end sites to specify which asset management system you want to use. The new asset management system is the default (false or null); if you want to use the legacy Asset Management system for Commerce Manager, set the value to true. If you use the legacy system, the Assets tab in the catalog editing UI is removed.

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

• AssetServiceDatabase saves, edits, and deletes to the CatalogItemAsset table. The assetKey used is now ContentGuid from Episerver asset file.
• CommerceMedia and CommerceMediaCollection store asset data on a product page.
• The assets migration tool (introduced in version 7.5) migrates the old ECF asset system to the new Episerver asset system.

Default asset for content

EntryContentBase and NodeContent implements IAssetContainer, which contains the property CommerceMediaCollection. Content that implements the IAssetContainer interface can contain several assets. In many cases, only one of the assets is shown at the site. The first item in the asset collection list is used in the UI by default. See also  Asset URL resolver for more information.

Related topics

• Content in the Episerver platform
• Asset URL resolver
• Assets and media for the Episerver platform
• Blob storage and BLOB providers for the Episerver platform
• Asset Importer for Commerce
• Asset URL resolver for Commerce