In 11g WebCenter Content (WCC) introduced dispersion rules in the vault and weblayout directory paths to better distribute content across the directories. The dispersion rule was based on dRevClassID. The only problem with this is that dRevClassID did not remain the same when you copied content from one WCC instance to another using Archiver like in a contribution-consumption scenario. This could cause problems because the web-viewable path would not be the same between the contribution and consumption instances.

In the PS5 (11.1.1.6.0) release of WCC they addressed this by configuring the File Store Provider (FSP) so that all new content would use a storage rule with a dispersion rule based on dDocName, which would stay the same when content was copied to another WCC instance. To support migration from older versions of WCC they left the default storage rule unchanged and created a new storage rule called DispByContentId and made that the default storage rule for all new content.

I only stumbled upon this a while back when I was trying to change the FSP configuration so that all content used a webless storage rule. I changed the default storage rule, restarted WCC, and checked in a new content item. To my surprise the new content was not created as webless. I struggled with this for a while until I noticed there were multiple storage rules defined in the FSP configuration. When I looked at the default value for the xStorageRule field in Configuration Manager, sure enough it was no longer default, but was now DispByContentId.

Once I updated the DispByContentId storage rule to webless and restarted WCC all my new content was now created using the webless storage rule, just like I wanted.

I noticed when I was creating this blog post that the default storage rule is also listed on the File Store Provider Information page, but I guess I didn't see that when I originally did this.