Learn what to do if an AVAIL Channel becomes disconnected from its source location (broken link).
Best Practice Steps
Although AVAIL Tag IO does not support re-pathing content, there are several ways to fix broken content links in AVAIL to source files.
The following steps are the easiest way to restore links while avoiding possible errors.
Step 1:
First, create a new AVAIL Channel for staging purposes.
Step 2:
Index the content from its new location on the network into the new Staging Channel.
Important note: If you want to retain customized tags that you previously edited on the content in the original Channel, then do step 3:
Step 3 (Optional):
Open the new Staging Channel and use the Tag Import tool to "borrow" the tags from the original channel.
a. Use the Select Source Channel as the input method. Select the original Channel. Do not use the Upload Spreadsheet option.
b. Check the boxes for the tag keys you wish to import to tag content.
Step 4:
Then, in the original channel, search for all the content with broken links, and delete that content from the original channel.
Helpful tip: The Channel Audit tool can help with this. See the Channel Audit section below.
Step 5:
Then select the content in the Staging Channel, and right-click to select "Add to Channel". Select the original channel from the list of channels in the dialog, and then choose MOVE, to move the content from the Staging Channel to the original Channel.
Alternate Options
Instead of restoring the content to the original channel (Step 5), you can simply delete the old channel. As long as you name the new channel the same as the original and "unshare" the old one, end users won’t be affected. With this approach, Step 4 would also be unnecessary.
Channel Audit Workflow
If your original channel contains a mix of correctly and incorrectly pathed content, the Channel Audit tool can help you organize that.
Find out more about Channel Audit here: How to Quickly Find "Broken" (Inaccessible) Content in a Channel
- In the original channel, click on the three dots in the AVAIL interface, and click Run Channel Audit.
- Select Tag as Broken, to tag broken content found by the Audit. Then filter your original channel based on this tag.
- Adjust the visibility of this key and tag if you don’t see it. See instructions here How to Quickly Find "Broken" (Inaccessible) Content in a Channel
- Delete the broken content from the original channel.
Important Tips
There is an important difference between Tag IO and Tag Import.
Tag IO is for exporting tags from content in a channel to a spreadsheet, editing tag values in the spreadsheet, and uploading the edited tag values from the spreadsheet back to the content in the same channel.
The Tag IO workflow hinges on column A in the spreadsheet, the content ID number. The content ID number must match across the download and upload within the Tag IO workflow. Columns A (ID), B (path), and C (name) must not be edited in Tag IO.
Tag Import is different. Tag Import is designed to let you apply tags hinging on the content file name only (not content ID). The leftmost column in the sheet in Tag Import must be for content file names. More information on Tag Import is here: How to use Tag Import
Advanced Tip
If you use Tag IO in step 3 above instead of Tag Import, you must run Tag IO export on the original channel before indexing the content to the staging channel, and before deleting that content from the channel.
You would not be able to use Tag IO to upload to associate tags with the newly indexed content in the staging channel because those new files would have new Content IDs (because they are sourced from a different network location).
You could, however, use the tag data from the Tag IO export to bring back onto the newly indexed files through the Tag Import tool. Tag Import uses the filename as the matching item, not the Content ID.
Please advise: When using the spreadsheet option in the Tag Import workflow, you must ensure that there is no ID column and no Path column in the spreadsheet and that the leftmost column of the spreadsheet is the file name.