Publishing Actions allow admin users to publish sets of assets to a local or network directory.  A publishing action can be triggered manually from the admin interface, or configured to automatically run daily (you can specify the hour of the day on which it will run using the setting run-publishing-actions-hour-of-day).

Creating a 'Publishing Action'

The first step is specify the "Search Criteria" which will define the sets of assets to publish by the action.

When a publishing action is triggered all the assets that match the given publish criteria will be "published".
The filename used to publish the Assets is the Asset 'Id' by default, and can be changed in:
Admin > Attributes > Display Attributes > Publishing

Once you have set the 'Publish Criteria' you can choose which transfer method to use: Simple Copy, FTP, SCP or Asset Bank Copy.

When using Simple Copy, directories can be specified as regular local directories or as UNC paths (e.g. "\\PublishServer\PublishDirectory").
Local publish directories can be constrained using the setting publishing-file-copy-jail-directory (in the ApplicationSettings.properties file) so that every 'publish location' will be automatically set inside this folder.
Admin users must ensure that the Asset Bank service has the correct permissions to create files in the given directory and that the publishing-file-copy-jail-directory setting is set to an ancestor of the directory.

When an Usage Type for resizing is selected the Image Assets will be published in different format size, according with the settings specified in the given Usage Type.
If nothing is selected then the original Asset file will be used instead.

A publish action Attribute used for Subdirectory Name is available to create sub-directories in the top-level director associated with that action. When creating a 'publish action' the admin user will select an attribute - the value of this for a particular asset will be used when that asset is published to determine the name of the subdirectory into which to copy the published images.

The Unpublish option specify whether the Assets that no longer match the search criteria should be unpublished (i.e. deleted) when the publish action runs.

If FTP/SCP option is selected then the server details like, server IP, user name, password and the port number need to be provided (please read this article  for SCP configuration).

NOTE: The default port numbers are used for the FTP – 21 and SCP – 22 are used, this can be changed depending on the setting of the environment.  

What happens when a Publishing Action "changes"?

If one of the publishing options changes (i.e. Usage Type, Subdirectory, Publish Location or Publish filename) then the published Assets path will be affected the next time the action runs.

When re-publishing the "new versions" Asset Bank will automatically delete the "old versions" (unless you have changed the Transfer Method).

Note:  if you want to apply your changes to all published Assets you must manually run a "full" publish action.