Mass importing assets from Acquia DAM

You’ve decided to use Acquia DAM for managing your digital assets, and now you need to get those assets into Drupal where they can be put to use. Acquia has you covered for most use cases with the Media: Acquia DAM module. This module provides a suite of tools to allow you to browse the DAM for assets and associate them to Media entities. It goes a step farther by then ensuring that those assets and their metadata stay in synch when updates are made in the DAM. This handles the key use case of being able to reference assets to an existing entity in Drupal, but what if your digital assets are meant to live stand-alone in the Drupal instance? This was the outlying use case we ran into on a recent project.

The Challenge

The customer site had the requirement of building several filterable views of PDF resources. It didn’t make sense to associate each PDF to a node or other entity, as all of the metadata required to build the experience could be contained within the Media entity itself. The challenge now was to get all of those assets out of the DAM and into media entities on the Drupal site without manually referencing them from some other Drupal entity.

The Solution

By leveraging the API underlying the Media: Acquia DAM module we were able to create our own module to manage mass importing entire folders of assets from Acquia DAM into a specified Media bundle in Drupal. This takes advantage of the same configuration and access credentials used by Media: Acquia DAM and also leverages that module for maintaining updates to metadata for the assets post-import. The Acquia DAM Asset Importer module allows the site administrator to specify one or more folders from Acquia DAM to import assets from. Once configured, the module runs as a scheduled task through Drupal’s cron. On each cron run, the module will first check to see if there are any remaining import tasks to complete. If not, it will use the Acquia DAM API to retrieve a list of asset IDs for the specified folders. It compares that to the list of already imported assets. If new assets exist in the folders in Acquia DAM, they’re then added to the module’s Queue implementation to be imported in the background. The QueueWorker implementation that exists as part of the Acquia DAM Asset Importer will then process it’s queue on subsequent cron runs, generating a new Media entity of the specified bundle, adding the asset_id from Acquia DAM and executing save() on the entity. At this point the code in Media: Acquia DAM takes over, pulling in metadata about the asset and synching it and the associated file to Drupal. Once the asset has been imported into Drupal as a Media entity, the Media: Acquia DAM module keeps the metadata for that Media Entity in synch with Acquia DAM using its own QueueWorker and Cron implementations to periodically pull data from DAM and update the Media entity.

Try it out

Are you housing assets in Acquia DAM and need to import them into your Drupal site? We’ve contributed the Acquia DAM Asset Importer module on Drupal.org. Download it here and try it out.