Simplest Way to Deploy PDF's in Tridion 2011

Question

What options do I have for deploying a group of PDF's that will be searched via a Taxonomy-API based search page? Are my only options:

1) Add each PDF to a page via a component presentation

2) Write a C# TBB to output them.

I don't like option 1 because links to the pdf's will only show up when the user searches for them. So I'm left with option 2, correct? Just add a page with a TBB, whose sole purpose is to publish the PDF's & metadata?

UPDATE:

I added a DWT TBB with the following line( note the extra @@), and my PDF's publish.

link

Answer 1

A good option for this kind of functionality is to build a Component Template (CT) that supports "Publish as Dynamic Component", this will create a Dynamic Component Presentation (DCP). Then add the schema that your PDF is based on to the Linked Schemas field of your new CT.

The easiest way to get your PDF to actually deploy is to make a DWT Template Building Block which looks something like this:

<a href="" tridion:href="@@Component.ID@@" tridion:type="binary">link</a> 

And add it to your new Compound Template, followed by the default finish actions TBB.

Then you can publish the PDF Components directly, and the binaries will get deployed, and any metadata on Multimedia Component will get placed in the Broker Database for querying with the Taxonomy and Broker APIs.

Answer 2

You can publish each PDF as a dynamic component presentation. Each PDF Multimedia component would need some metadata fields defined to hold your taxonomy lookup data (i.e. keywords). Then your search page would retrieve the PDFs that match the searched keyword using the Content Delivery Taxonomy API.