Tech Blog

Datalists out-of-the-box don’t have a whole lot of functionality outside of simply capturing data. A simple way to help users is to add calculated columns that transform other columns or related data from the repository. In Alfresco 3.3 this functionality is straightforward and allows creating powerful datalists that even an Excel user could love. For this demo we will create a part of a project management datalist that takes allows users to enter the following: Estimated to completion, estimated at completion, actuals and budget. From these inputs we will generate the variance, percent complete and percent expended. ...

A coworker and I have been scheming for a number of months on ways to run migration scripts and develop workflow in Alfresco. The common thread is that we have a repository that’s running and we want run arbitrary code against it. We have had a number of ideas that have taken us in two different directions. I’d like to talk about a few of them, outline the issues we’ve run into and then outline our merged solution. ...

Our development environment runs off an exploded a war file in an embedded version of jetty, all running in Eclipse. We typically build the war from source pulled from Alfresco Enterprise SVN. Knowing how to do this means we can checkout from any of the development branches and get a feeling for how different features are progressing without waiting for the official build to be distributed. It also give me a warm fuzzy to know how the beast is built. ...

There seems to be many times that the Alfresco repository needs to be modified when an AMP is first installed e.g. migration of current nodes. While Alfresco provides a data bootstrap mechanism it appears it is inadequate for anything except the most basic tasks. This post was predicated on finding a use of the patch service in the WCM installation script. I haven’t seen many docs on the proper or improper use of the patch service. At first blush it is used as a Repository internal tool to update the repository during major releases and hotfixes. As I’ve mentioned, the inspiration for this came from the WCM “installation” during which you insert the wcm-bootstrap-context.xml into the repositories classpath and then start it up. In that file is a new bean that uses the patch service to create a couple of folders. ...

Installing customizations using AMPs into a new Alfresco repository is pretty easy, there isn’t much room for configuration overwriting other configuration. In older systems that have been installed by a client or in systems that have multiple SI’s customizations installed it maybe the case, especially in Share, where configuration from one amp overwrites the configuration of another amp. You can get into difficult to detect problems depending on the order in which amps are applied to Alfresco (probably alphanumeric, last one wins). ...