Block
A Block is a "pluggable " piece of content that can be easily substituted with or without styling into any page region.
There are five types of Blocks in Cascade Server:
- Index Block - used to dynamically generate system assets as XML
- XML Block - static XML content
- XHTML Block - static XHTML content
- XML Feed Block - dynamic XML from a third-party server (e.g. RSS feed)
- Text Block - static text content
Blocks are "pluggable" and reusable - one block can contain text or markup (for example, a copyright notice that should appear on more than one page) that can be plugged into a page region at three levels: the template level, the page configuration level, or the page level. When a block is plugged into a page region at the template level, the block content will appear in any pages using that template. Any blocks assigned at the page configuration level will appear in any pages using that configuration.
Block assignments made at the template level can be overridden at either the configuration set or page level. Block assignments made at the configuration set level can also be overridden at the page level.
Whenever there is content that is common to many pages or regions, that content should be put in a block, allowing it to appear in many pages while being updateable in one place, making it easy to maintain that markup/text across many pages. A single block can be reused into an unlimited amount of page regions.
Generally, when a block contains XML content (in the case of an index, XML, or XML feed block), that block's xml data is styled with the use of an XSL stylesheet before it is substituted into a page region. This also makes blocks reusable in the sense that one block can be styled in many different ways to output the same content with different looks and feels.