"Virtual" assets in the Dam

[evert_pot]

Hi Folks,

I'm fairly new to AEM, so bear with me. I'm tasked to integrate a sort of 'virtual asset' into an AEM website.
The use-case is that the end-user wants to manage videos, hosted on external websites (youtube, vimeo) as if they are AEM assets.

I started looking into doing this by creating a custom AEM DAM Media Handler, and define a new mime-type for these types of embeds.
The DAM documentation I found so far seems to suggest though that really the DAM is intended for physical files. We don't really have a physical file here, just a number of properties linking to the right resource.

So my question to you is, would we be abusing the intent of the DAM by taking this approach? Am I thinking about this all wrong? Willing to do the research, but I can use a few pointers in the right direction.

Cheers,

Evert

[smacdonald2008 · Accepted solution]

AEM DAM does not support virtual assets. You need to place physical files there if you want to use AEM DAM functionality. Remember that AEM is a CRM - meaning that the resource is in the repository.

[evert_pot]

smacdonald2008 wrote...

AEM DAM does not support virtual assets. You need to place physical files there if you want to use AEM DAM functionality. Remember that AEM is a CRM - meaning that the resource is in the repository.

It makes sense, but the 'content' in this case is the meta-data associated with it. A link itself could be considered 'content', even if the target is not stored locally.

But I guess that's semantics and not super important. Our real goal is that the customer can manage their remote content in a central place in AEM, and in particular manage the links and meta-data, which can then be embedded again in any page in their website.
If the DAM is not the appropriate place to store this type of content, is there a different approach you can recommend?

Thanks for your quick response!

Evert