What is the difference between iparsys and design dialog?

Question

What is the recommended approach for a site header; footer components wherein ask is to author the global components only once at home page and all the pages under the site will reuse the content. A design dialog will save authored content under /etc/designs and pages with same template will simply pick them. Similar requirement can be acheived using iparsys also. Which is the recommended approach?

Answer 1

With design dialog,

1. Your configurations are stored under the design i.e, under /etc/design.
2. Any change to the configuration would affect all the pages using the same template.
3. The component can be edited on any page in design mode and it would show you all the values configured currently.

However the issue is, the author needs to configure this component in each template separately if there is more than one template for the site.

But with iParsys, if all your templates include the iParsys with the same name, then authoring the component on the parent page would make it available for all the child pages.

There are various other ways also through which this can be achieved.

1. Having a site level configuration page that carries configurations which is applicable to the entire site.
2. Using an InheritanceValueMap instead of ValueMap to read the configurations of the component from the parent/home page.
3. Using an absolute path for including the component, so that all the data gets saved in the same path, no matter in which page you edit the component.

I cannot say that this is the right approach. However given so many possibilities, pick the one which most suits your needs.