MDM links to images on Unix for WCEM

[Former Member]

I am looking for information on options of storing the WCEM product images outside MDM server and only uploading the reference link.

The preference is to only upload the reference link to server and filename into MDM and attach the link to the product in MDM.

What has been tried so far:

- Web Server running on UNIX

- A folder has been created on the UNIX server eg. \usr\sap\Images\ABC.jpg (abc.jpg being the image to be displayed)

- The java stack has been configured so it will host these files via a http address http://server:port/Images/ABC.jpg

- When the URL above is entered into a browser the image is displayed.

Is it possible to reference an image from MDM and assign it to a product?

What are the settings and format of the URL or link?

Are there any steps that need to be configured on the Java stack or in MDM to support this?

Will the MDM mass upload support the linking of the image link to the product?

Any information or examples would be greatly appreciated.

thanks.

[Former Member]

Hello Mitchell,

Did you finally succeed doing this?

We have exactly the same case for our customer and we don't know how to proceed...

Thanks in advance for your answer

Regards

Nicolas

[Former Member]

Hi Nicholas,

I will check but I think they looked at Samba or placing the images on a windows server.

regards

Mitch

[Former Member]

Hi Nicholas,

Here's the full answer

After thoroughly
reviewing the matter, SAP MDM support team has advised that "adding images
with the Data Manager to a UNIX based MDS(where only the links are stored) is
not possible due to the inherent differences between the filesystems and how
they are interpreted on each of the operating systems (how UNIX interprets
windows directory structure and vice versa). " Unless we use a JAVA API to
loaded the images in which will involve more development and maintenance
efforts.
There is a caching mechanism of WCEM application -"Once an image has been requested once by the webshop it will remain in the local cache(on the portal machine) and will
not be requested from the MDS again." Also "Saving the images on the
repository - this eliminates the need for MDS to find the image each time it is
requested." These indicate that having images in MDM repository should
provide a comparable performance, except of taking a bit more space in the
database for the images.

To summarize our approach as a result:

1. Business agreed to load
images into a windows share with proper folder structure and the files will be
named after the product IDs

2. Images will then
be loaded into MDM repository directly via MDM Data Manager by IT/Business

3. Images will be
associated to products via the template upload by IT

[Former Member]

Hi Mitchell,

Thanks a lot for this answer. We will probably use the same method then.