Using Files

• Files of any type can be added to an Open-eGov site. Each department folder contains a downloads folder designed for storing these files. There is also an images folder provided which is designed to hold images that are displayed in site pages. Any standard folder that is added within a department can also hold files.
• Open-eGov also provides for four special file types (Excel Spreadsheet, Word Document, PDF, and PowerPoint. Open-eGov does not do anything special with these, they are provided to assist content managers to organize their content.
• There is no built-in linkage to files. They would only be available to the public when published and linked to from another page.
• Except for PDFs, file content is not indexed and therefore not included in search results. PDF indexing is available because of the use of TextIndexNG3.
• Some files content, such as txt files, is displayed when viewing the file. Others will automatically open up a pop-up to either open or download the file. You can get just a view to the link by adding /view to the file's url.
• We are currently testing a package that enables files to be stored on the file system rather than in the data.fs. Our testing includes code for migrating existing files. On a site that uses files a lot, this can result in a significant reduction in the size of the data.fs, though some space is still needed to store some object information. An added benefit is more file types are indexed (such as Word documents). Even though the server has to get the files from the file system, server performance is still improved due to the decreased size of the data.fs. We will post documentation when our testing and implementation are complete).