Assets folders do not have to be physically located in the HoTMetaL PRO Assets folder; you can mount read-only asset folders on a Website or Intranet. Once these folders have been accessed, users can drag assets to HoTMetaL PRO documents in the same way as for local assets, but they cannot add new assets to the asset folders.
The steps for setting this up are as follows:
[InternetShortcut] URL=http://www.mysite.com/xmassets/fxindex.htmThe value of URL must be the location of the fxindex.htm file in the remote assets folder on your server.
In the remote assets folder (xmassets), create an fxitems.xml file such as the following:
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?> <FOLDERS MODIFIED="19990511.1"> <FOLDER NAME="Buttons" URL="http://www.mysite.com/xmassets/buttons/fxindex.htm"> <FOLDER NAME="BigButtons" URL="http://www.mysite.com/xmassets/buttons/bbuttons/fxindex.htm"> </FOLDER> <FOLDER NAME="LittleButtons" URL="http://www.mysite.com/xmassets/buttons/lbuttons/fxindex.htm"> </FOLDER> </FOLDER> ... </FOLDERS>
This file describes the structure of the remote assets folder by specifying URLs to the fxindex.htm files in each asset folder. This particular example corresponds to a Buttons folder containing two sub-folders.
When an HoTMetaL PRO user accesses the remote assets, a folder structure is built underneath their own Remote folder. This structure parallels the logical structure (which may be the same as the physical structure) of the assets on the remote server, based on the arrangement of FOLDER elements, but the only content in each local folder is an Internet shortcut file (assets.url) pointing to the folder on the remote server. If the MODIFIED attribute value changes in the top-level remote fxitems.xml file, this local structure will be updated the next time the user accesses remote assets.
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