1. Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to content management systems, and more specifically relates to rule checking in a content management system.
2. Background Art
A content management system (CMS) allows many users to efficiently share electronic content such as text, audio files, video files, pictures, graphics, etc. Content management systems typically control access to content in a repository. A user may generate content, and when the content is checked into the repository, the content may be subsequently processed by the CMS according to predefined rules. A user may also check out content from the repository, or link to content in the repository while generating content. The rules in a CMS assure that content that comes into or out of the system or that is linked to meets desired criteria specified in the rules.
Known content management systems check their rules when content comes into or out of the system. If a rule is satisfied, the CMS may perform subsequent processing on the content. Known content management systems may include rules related to bursting, linking, and synchronization. Bursting rules govern how a document is bursted, or broken into individual chunks, when the document is checked into the repository. By bursting a document into chunks, the individual chunks may be potentially reused later by a different author. Linking rules are used for importing and associating objects related to a CMS document based on particular elements or attributes from the document as specified by the rules. For example, an XML document that references external images can take advantage of linking rules so that relationships between the XML content and the external images are automatically created when the document is imported or checked into the repository. Another kind of linking rule governs what content in a repository a user may link to in a document that will be subsequently checked into the repository. Synchronization rules govern synchronization between content and metadata related to the content. For example, a synchronization rule may specify that whenever a specified CMS attribute is changed, a particular piece of XML in the content should be automatically updated with that attribute's value.
Current techniques for using these rules to process XML data are inefficient. In the prior art, the entire XML source document must be read into memory, and all of the content rules are evaluated against the source document each time the document is imported or checked into the repository. Even if the source document does not contain content pertaining to the rules, all of the content rules are evaluated against the source document, which requires processor capacity and thus decreases system performance. As the size of the XML source documents increase, the performance of the system will decrease proportionally. Without a way to avoid loading an entire source document into memory and checking all of the content rules against all of the document, the computer industry will continue to suffer from decreased performance as the size of documents and the number of content rules increases.