Setting the WoodWing article format to use

In Enterprise, articles are stored in WoodWing's WCML format. Two versions of this format exist.

This article describes which formats these are, when they can be used and how to configure the system to use them.

The WCML format

The WoodWing article format is known as the WCML format, after the file extension .wcml.

With the release of Smart Connection 12.2.0 a new version of this format was introduced: 'WCML3'. The old format is since then referred to as 'WCML2'.

Compared to the WCML2 format, the WCML3 format brings the following improvements:

• Reduced file size by not duplicating all style definitions, colors, swatches, fonts, and font families for each article component.
• Improved performance for opening and saving the article by replacing the parser that is used for exporting and importing article data by a more modern, better performing XML parser.

Reducing data transfer and file size is important, especially for Enterprise Aurora installations and cloud hosting. The WCML3 article format will help with this.

Expected performance improvements

During the development of the WCML3 format, much testing was done to determine the performance improvement. What the improvement will be in your production environment very much depends on the complexity of the articles:

Small articles containing only a few components will see very little improvement.

For complex articles containing many styles (100+) and over 30 components, we saw a reduction in article size of 90%, while the speed of opening the article improved by 30%.

Compatibility

The table below show the compatibility of the WCML formats for Smart Connection, Enterprise Server, and Studio.

When to use WCML3

When both WMCL2 and WCML3 are supported, consider using the WCML3 when:

• New Enterprise installations are set up that include Enterprise Server 10.2 or later, Studio, and Smart Connection for CC 2017 or higher.
• Complex articles containing many components are used.
• Situations in with high latency exist and where large articles are created and edited in Studio (this is typically the case when InDesign Servers for preview generation are hosted in the cloud).
• A major upgrade to Smart Connection for CC 2018 is performed.

Default formats

The default article format that is used depends on the version of Smart Connection used:

Technical details

In the WCML3 format, the structure of the story has been changed: XML elements (such as styles, colors, preferences, and so on) that are shared by stories are no longer in every story but are instead placed in a shared section. The content section itself has not been changed. Third-parties that rely on the content structure should not be affected.

The structure of article templates files (.wcmt) has not been changed.

The XML parser that is used to import and export styling data and story content has been replaced with pugixml. The previous parser was Xerces based. The switch is motivated by performance considerations.

For the XML schemas including an example of each schema, see the following link:

• WCML2 and WCML3 example files

Upgrade strategy

Enabling WCML3 affects all users signing in to the instance of Enterprise Server, regardless of the version of Smart Connection or Studio that they are using. It is important therefore to only switch to the generation of articles in WCML3 format when all users use clients that support that format.

Configuration

For versions in which both WCML2 and WCML3 are supported (see above), enabling a version can be done by adding one of the following options to the SERVERFEATURES in the config_overrule.php file of Enterprise Server:

new Feature( 'WcmlVersion2' ),

new Feature( 'WcmlVersion3' ),