Where/How to store assets

There are multiple ways to store an asset in the cms (repository). It depends very much on the exact use case which solution fits best.

The following options exist for storing and optionally referencing assets:

1. Store asset in the Assets section of the Content application, i.e. below /content/assets: These assets contain no publication workflow. These assets can be linked to from documents.
2. Store asset embedded in dedicated custom document ( myresourcedocument type) in the Documents section of the Content Perspactive, i.e. below /content/documents. Assets embedded in a dedicated document type piggyback on the publication workflow of that document. These asset documents can be linked to from other documents.
3. Store asset embedded in your document directly: Such an asset has publication workflow by piggybacking on the document's publication workflow and the asset's text will be text-indexed on the document that contains the asset. Therefore, the document will be searchable by search terms which are part of the asset.

All options above have their strengths and weaknesses:

1. Option 1 is the most lightweight.
2. Option 1 and 2 provide assets that are reusable, as they are stored in one location and linked to from documents that need them.
3. Finding assets by means of a site search works out-of-the-box for option 3. Achieving this for options 1 and 2 would be quite complicated: For each asset(1) or asset-document(2) found, another query must ge executed to determine which documents make use of them, there may be multiple per asset. This doesn't scale for searches that have many hits, and it is impossible to quickly determine how many search results there are.