FORMal Discussions

A lot has happened since my last post over a year ago!

Full support for metadata is now available in Share, forms are used in several key areas of Share including the datalists feature and the Web Editor product is centered around the forms capabilities.

With forms becoming more prevalent I thought it might be useful to have an easy way to find, run and learn from examples as well as providing utilities to help configure and customize your own forms.

The Forms Development Kit (FDK) was introduced in the 3.3 release, being fairly new it currently consists of a few example form configurations (using 3 custom types and a custom aspect), custom templates & controls and a “Form Console” utility. One of the example forms is shown in the screenshot below.

The intention for the future is to provide working demonstrations of all the example configurations given in the Forms wiki pages, to host “incubator” controls, provide a testing platform for our internal QA department, show how the forms engine can be customized to suit your needs and of course provide utilities to help you configure your own forms.

The FDK can be accessed from the 3.3 community release download page, full details on how to install and use it are given on the FDK wiki page.

As of this morning the Share web client has very early support for viewing and editing custom metadata.

The FormUI component being implemented as part of the new forms engine is now used in the document details page and the new edit metadata page in Alfresco Share.

The screenshot below shows metadata being viewed and the link that has been modified to launch the new edit metadata page. 

Details of the new forms engine can be found here, the only information currently present on the page is the configuration syntax, more information will be published as the development cycle for the next release of Share progresses.

A working example of the form configuration can be found in projects/web-framework-commons/config/alfresco/web-framework-config-commons.xml. Those familiar with configuring custom metadata for the Alfresco Explorer web client will recognise the approach, the usual extension techniques can be used to customise the forms displayed. Just place a file called “web-framework-config-custom.xml” in the “alfresco.web-extension” package to override the default configuration or provide your own customisations.

The default configuration produces an edit metadata page as shown below.

As mentioned above this is very early support so features are limited, subject to change at any time and will more than likely have some instability. Only basic property types are currently supported i.e. no repeating value properties, there also isn’t any support for categories, tags or associations.

Over the next few weeks I will try and write several “How To” posts highlighting the features as they are implemented, in the meantime, please check out the source code from SVN, start investigating and provide us feedback.

Welcome to my Alfresco blog.

As the tagline suggests I plan to use this blog to post my thoughts, announcements and examples of using, customising and current and future forms engines.

The Forms wiki page will serve as the landing page for all things forms but as can been seen it’s very early days. In the meantime you can peruse the current metadata and XForms wiki pages or refer to some examples on my colleagues blog.