Updates / Guides
Blocks, graphs and shared records explained
Most schema problems start with one mix-up: the shape of a thing and the facts about it end up in the same place. JSON-LD Schema Manager keeps them apart on purpose, with three things. Blocks hold the shape. Graphs hold the values. Shared records hold the facts you state once. Once that clicks, the rest of the app makes sense.
A block is the shape of your entity
A block is one schema.org type and the properties it carries. An Article block says an article has a headline, a datePublished, an author and a publisher. It says nothing about which article. There are no values in it.
That is what makes a block reusable. The same Article block can describe every article on your site, because it only describes what an article looks like.
A graph is the values
A graph brings one or more blocks together for a kind of page, and gives every property a value. The Article Graph says where the headline comes from, where the date comes from, and who the publisher is.
Most values come from fields on the page template. You map the headline property to the Title field once, and every article page supplies its own title. Some values come from the page itself, such as the language. Some are typed once and never change.
Shared records hold the facts you state once
Some facts are the same everywhere: your organisation’s name, logo and head office. These go in a shared record, such as Organization Mini. The Article Graph points its publisher at that record, and so does every other graph that needs it. Change the record once, and every page that uses it publishes the change.
Does the value change from page to page? Map it to a field in the graph. Is it the same everywhere? Put it in a shared record. Is it part of what the thing is? That belongs in the block.
Why the split matters
- Change the shape once. Add a property to the Article block, and every graph that uses it can give it a value.
- Change the facts once. Update a shared record, and every page that points at it stays consistent.
- Keep identity stable. Because the organisation lives in one record with one
@id, search engines and answer engines see one organisation, not a different one on every page.
How it reaches the page
Each graph becomes a partial design in Sitecore. You add it to the page designs your site already uses, and every page built on those designs publishes the JSON-LD. See How it works for the full picture.
Every guide here is the short version. The full one, step by step with the screens, is inside the app under Help & guides.