# Assets Behavior

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/assets-behavior/66397>\
**Category:** Radiant CMS\
**Created:** [August 25, 2006, 6:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/assets-behavior/66397 "2006-08-25T06:11:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![gui\_dos](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/e79b87/32.png) [@gui\_dos](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gui_dos)\
**Post date:** [August 25, 2006, 6:11am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/assets-behavior/66397/1 "2006-08-25T06:11:56Z")

</div>

Hi!

I decided to roll my own, after taking a look at Dror’s source code.  
The code isn’t bad but I don’t want to get into patching Radiant  
itself to support a plugin, seems safer to try and make it work within  
the mainstream and besides, that gave me an excuse to write a Radiant  
behavior.

The Asset List behavior uses an extra page part called ‘assets’ within  
which the user has created a YAML representation of the assets that  
need to be centralized. The format is straightforward and amenable to  
machine generation.

The YAML list is organized, first by asset host (which is a URL under  
which the assets are kept), and the entries under this host are the  
various content types (I use mime types to organize this content, but  
actually, anything can be a key since the behaviour doesn’t actually  
depend on mime types.

I’ll make an example, by pointing out some of my own use cases. I keep  
several files in a /files URL which contains different types of  
content. I have some projects that I like to keep separate from my  
personal files, and those go into subdirectories.

[http://sohne.net/files:](http://sohne.net/files:)

```
application/pdf:

  CV.pdf: Curriculum Vitae
  revenue.pdf: A Community Revenue Collection System

```

[http://sohne.net/files/semafox:](http://sohne.net/files/semafox:)

```
application/pdf:

  semapedia.pdf: Semapedia in Africa

application/octet-stream:

  semacoder-0.47.dmg: Semacoder 0.47 (Mac OS X)

```

Inside the page that I have designated as my assets page by setting  
the ‘Asset List’ behavior, I can put in tags that will filter my  
assets by content type, or by host, or both, and use that to list the  
assets that match the conditions.

- 

Visiting my asset page will then give me a list of all my PDF  
documents regardless of the actual asset location. In addition, the  
Asset List behavior will automatically transform all child URLs that  
match the asset key (e.g semapedia.pdf).

In addition to the above behavior, which is really just a convenient  
way to list your site assets, you can access URLs such as (my asset  
list page is /assets)

[http://sohne.net/assets/semapedia.pdf](http://sohne.net/assets/semapedia.pdf)

and you will be automatically redirected to the actual content. The  
system doesn’t handle duplicate asset keys, only taking the first one  
that it gets. I think this is a GOOD THING, to have one key per  
resource.

I’ve placed the code in a Subversion repository accessible via

svn+ssh://sohne.net/users/home/guido/svn/assets\_behavior

and you can check it out with

svn co  
svn+ssh://sohne.net/users/home/guido/svn/assets\_behavior/trunk/assets\_behavior

I’m not sure if anonymous access to my repository is working yet so  
I’ve added a tarball to my assets available via  
[http://sohne.net/assets/assets\_behavior-0.0.1.tar.gz](http://sohne.net/assets/assets_behavior-0.0.1.tar.gz)

I hope this is useful and I had fun writing and learning about Radiant  
behaviors. My only regret is that behavior is not spelt behaviour  
since this led to a lot of grief for me (my muscle memory is  
intimately hooked up with behaviour).

Question: I am memoizing the YAML parse and I need to invalidate it  
when the ‘assets’ page part is updated. How do I do this?

– G.