Working with resource manager objects

Within IBM® Content Manager, every managed entity is called an item. Items come in two types, the type that represent pure logical entities, such as documents or folders, or entities that represent physical data objects, such as the text data of a word processing document, the scanned image of a claim or the video clip of an automobile accident. Objects have a special state and behavior needed to handle the physical data associated to a logical document.

Resource objects also represent things like files in a file system, video clips in a video server, and BLOBs. At run time, resource objects are used to access the physical data they point to. For that reason, resource objects in Content Manager have a type. That is, they have a specific state and behavior. The library server and the resource manager share a schema to store the state of an object. The base object types provided by Content Manager are: generic BLOBs or CLOBs, Text, Image, and Video content objects. You can also create sub-classes of the pre-defined types. A resource object can also have user-defined attributes, which are used for search and retrieval.

From the Content Manager system perspective, each object is represented by a unique logical identifier, its Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). The library server manages the URI name space. On request, the library server maps URIs onto Uniform Resource Locators (URL). URLs are used to gain access to the physical data. URLs do not point directly to a storage area managed by the resource manager. Instead, the resource manager uses a local name space to convert logical object names to physical file names. Object URIs are created by the specific resource manager. The library server or the end-user can suggest an object URI (its name), but the decision is made by the resource manager.

You can access an object using the IBM Content Manager resource manager APIs (store, retrieve, update, delete, and so forth). In some cases, you can use APIs that are native to the object (stream, multicast, and stage) or file system.

For information about how to work with resource manager objects, see the SResourceItemCreationICM sample in the samples directory, IBMCMROOT/samples/java/icm or IBMCMROOT/samples/cpp/icm.