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What is the CDN?
To manage assets efficiently and with less redundant data, every answerspace is assigned to organisations, among which there is one primary organisation that owns a particular answerspace. Every organisation has different CDN locations that point to a location where its assets are kept. In turn, every answerspace points to a CDN location.
Using the CDN
The BlinkMobile Admin Manager now includes the link to ‘Manage Assets’ under the ‘Manage...’ menu option. This tool allows you to add/edit/delete assets to answerSpaces as well as copy or move assets between CDN locations. It removes the need to store multiple copies of the same asset (for example corporate logos) within multiple answerSpaces.
All the CDN locations associated with your Organisation's answerSpace will be shown below the asset listing for the current answerSpace.
If you wish to move, copy or delete an asset from a CDN location, simply click on it and choose from the dropdown list:
Your default CDN is set in the answerSpace settings window:
Adding or Importing Assets to the CDN
When you want to add an asset to your CDN, it's really quite simple.
Firstly, make sure your default CDN location is correct. (See here for instructions).
Choose Manage... Assets. The Asset Manager will appear. At the top of this screen is the Upload Pane:
Click 'Choose File' and navigate through the File system Window until you find the file you wish to add:
Click 'Open' and the file name will appear in the Upload Pane. If you wish add another file, just click the '+add' button. If you wish to add multiple files that are in an archive, you can do this by clicking 'Choose File' and selecting the Archive file:
It will appear in the upload pane with an option to extract the archive into its multiple components. To do this, click the checkbox:
Once you have selected all your assets, click the 'Upload' button and a progress message will appear. Your listing will not be immediately updated, but if you wish, you can click the 'Refresh' button.
Note that there are now new assets available for use.
Using Assets in MADL and CSS
CDN locations are stored by an Organisation. These CDN locations can be accessed across multiple server instances. i.e. Assets stored in a CDN location in d.blinkm.co can also be used on blinkm.co.
This makes the exporting of answerspaces from one server instance to another easier as the assets are available to all BMP instances
There is no need to use the full path of the asset such as ‘/images/answerSpaceId/asset.ext’. Simply just type the name of the asset and its type extension - ‘asset.ext’. The Platform will automatically find the location of the file.
The file should exist in the default CDN location of answerSpace configuration.
You should never use an absolute path to an asset as this will break when you export / import answerspaces.
Example 1 - in mADL
<img src='circle.png' alt='Circle' />
Example 2 - in CSS
element { list-style-image: url(circle.png); list-style-type: circle; }
Even if the css file is stored within the Assets manager, the Platform will create the relative path automatically.
One caveat: If the stylesheet is being used from an external server you need to use the full url. A way to find that url is right link on the image in the CDN assets window and (in chrome) "Copy Image Address".