Alfresco

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). ...