Media
The Media area holds your images and files. You reach it through the Media navigation entry.
An image here is a record of its own and not a file on the product. The same image hangs on several products, is transferred once, and keeps its own channel mapping in the target system. A data sheet for a whole variant family is therefore uploaded once and not twenty-four times.
Overview / gallery
Instead of a list you see a gallery, one tile per medium with a preview image, file name and file size. For an image that is the only usable presentation: a table of three hundred file names does not answer the question one actually has in front of a media library, namely which image is the right one.
Sorting is fixed to the file name, ascending.
Two buttons sit above the gallery, and both require a selected tile: Edit opens the medium in the detail view, Delete removes it after a confirmation. Below them lies the Upload area. Drop a file in or choose one, and TRADElube creates a new medium from it.
There is no New button: a medium without a file would be an empty record. It is therefore created only by uploading, either here or directly on the product in the Images section.
Delete removes the file from the client. It thereby disappears from every product it hangs on, and the products affected are marked as changed so the change goes into the connected systems on the next execution. That is the difference from Delete in a product's Images section: there you only release the link, here you delete the file.
The Filter field searches the file name, and a partial match is enough. It disappears as soon as a condition is set through Filter By. Below the gallery sit the pager, the Items per Page choice with the values 25, 50, 100 and 200, and the total number of media matching the current filter.
Filter By
The Filter By button offers three groups:
| Group | Filters by |
|---|---|
| Field | Name, External Source Url or Created At. A medium has no more fields than that |
| Property | A property set up for media |
| Channel | A channel. The filter works on whether the medium is mapped to that channel |
The Channel filter answers the question that comes up regularly with images: which images have arrived in the shop and which have not? How a condition you have set is edited and combined is described under products.
Detail view
The detail view shows a single medium with the collapsible sections Common, Properties and Channels. It shows no preview image: that sits in the gallery, and the two links in the Common section open the file at full size.
Common
The section carries the file's name and the two addresses it is reachable under.
| Field | Meaning | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Name | The file name under which TRADElube carries the medium | At the same time the caption in the gallery and the value sorted and searched by |
| External Source Url | The address the file was fetched from | Only shown where the medium comes from a transfer rather than from a data source. The link leads to the original |
| Internal Source Url | The address under which TRADElube serves the file itself | This is the address you pass on when a system is to fetch the image rather than receive it |
The two addresses answer different questions. The external one shows where the image came from and can be dead as soon as the supplier renames it. The internal one points at TRADElube and stays valid as long as the medium exists.
Properties
The section shows the properties set up for media, each with the input field of its type.
The section exists only if there are any properties for media at all. Properties on a medium are the case where their purpose is quickest to see: an image credit or a license belongs on the file and nowhere else. Properties are set up under Settings, through the Properties button, and explained under properties.
Channel mappings
The Channels section shows which connected systems the medium is linked to, one row per channel. Structure, fields and buttons are the same as on the product and are described there in detail: products.
The columns fit side by side without scrolling here, because a medium carries no long mapping values: Channel, Mapping, Executed At, Changes At and State are there at a glance.
Further reading
- Products: the Images section on the product, where a medium is assigned and marked as the cover
- Managing images: the path from uploading to the image in the shop
- Data model: why an image is a record of its own and not a field on the product
- Channel mappings: what the Mapping column holds and why it hangs on the record