Symphony.

I have noticed in S2 that DS's are only attached via pages and not via the master.xsl - is this because of the new structure of Symphony? Will this be more optimised? Because I found that S1.7 was a little sluggish for me, possibly because of me, but also because I may be loading extra DS's that are not always required.

I think this is the New Way. A believe Allen's phrase was 'the Page is King', so no more attaching DSs to utilities/masters.

Yes, the Page is King. I know it's a little annoying to re-associate common data sources to a new page every time, but the benefits of this approach are:

1. You no longer have to hunt around for your attached data source, "Was it on the master file or page"?
2. You no longer get the odd asterisk * symbol when a data source is already attached by the master.
3. It's much easier to look back at your page 3 months down the track and see what's going on because "Page is King" and that's the next place to go to debug anything (first place is ?debug).
4. Utility attachment is done by xsl:include/xsl:import. That way you can draw association between utilities and pages by function rather than by data. i.e. "my master utility needs to include the date-time.xsl utility since all my pages need it" and "my article page needs to include the slideshow utility, but no other page needs it".

Its intuitive, just takes some getting used to.

Coming to Symphony at v2, this was very intuitive. Coupling a DS with a utility would be a completely alien concept!

It makes things cleaner, at the expense of possible convenience. Always good i think. It was a kind of a headache to have to wade through your utilities to find why you were getting all these unneeded DSs.

yes, this issue was raised since s2 rev1. it is a little more tedious, but the workflow is easier to understand. it was a little bit getting used to coming from v1.7 to 2.

I have notice, though, that there's a common ds for a couple of pages. Is there a way to consolidate? Perhaps a data source of data sources? Or container of data source?

What's this common ds?

I imagine an extension at some point that has a bunch of developer "power tools" that would allow among other things, someone to apply a data source/event to multiple pages at once. This actually seems very easy to do and I might do it at some point but I'm far too busy at the moment.

@NickToye: Current Section, Page, Navigation, and Sections

Are common in all of my pages. I figure there will be more. Oh and you could rename Navigation to Pages. But I'm lazy atm, since if I do that I'll have to update all the pages. :(

Oh right, so your looking for a single ds for all those sections?

Yeah. Some way to consolidate them into a single Data Source.

couldn't you just create a new section and import the data some how?

Don't know.. can you elaborate?

@ibolmo,

If you want multiple DSs into one single DS, you could create a Page that has all the source DSs, then if you want to transform that data in any way, do that with XSL on that page. Output the page as straight XML (just like you'd want your composite DS to look), then add that Page as a dynamic data source to your final target page.

we were talking about this the other day;

http://symphony21.com/forum/discussions/240/1/

@ashooner

Ah good idea. I'll give it a shot. Thanks.