Paul Hampton

Back in January I posted a blog about how powerful the Aspect feature was in Alfresco. It included two videos – one showing how to apply an aspect and one showing how to search on an aspect. A number of people have asked about getting access to my configuration files so they could try it out themselves. So here are the instructions and sample files.

Overview

These customisations will add a number of new types and one new aspect:

Types	Attributes		Aspect	Attributes
Contract	Contract ID		Customer Info	Customer Name
Standard Operating Procedure	SOP ID			Customer ID
Report	Report ID			Customer Contact
Case File	Case ID
Issue Log	Issue ID
Proposal	Proposal ID
Meeting Notes	Meeting ID

Instructions

The demo configurations consist of 5 files. Copy these to the relevant location within the Alfresco install (note: if you already have some of these files, with local configurations, you will need to merge the changes).

Copy demomodel.properties to
[ALFREASCO]/tomcat/shared/clases/alfresco/web-extension/messages

(note: you will need to create the messages folder)

Copy custom-slingshot-application-context.xml and share-config-custom.xml to
[ALFRESCO]/tomcat/shared/clases/alfresco/web-extension

(note: you will most probably already have a share-config-custom.xml file. This one can replace the default one if you have not modified it)

Copy demo-context.xml and demoModel.xml to
[ALFRESCO]/tomcat/shared/clases/alfresco/extension

Now restart the server. If everything goes right you should now be able to…

Change the type Add an aspect Set the meta data Use the advanced search feature.

One of the new features included in Alfresco Enterprise Edition 3.2r (released 16th February 2010) is the ability for Alfresco Share to browse the Alfresco Repository (repo). I have run a number of webinars recently and have demonstrated this new feature. This has resulted in a couple of questions about how to enable this feature (by default it is switched off). So I thought I would write a note to guide you through the configuration process.

To enable your users to browse the repo using Share you need to edit the following XML configuration file:

C:\Alfresco\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\web-extension\share-config-custom.xml

(Note: My install of Alfresco on Windows and is under c:\Alfresco directory)

Look for the section ‘Repository Library config Section’ and change the <visible>false</visible> to true (see image below). After this you will need to restart the Alfresco server.

Now login to Alfresco Share and you should have a new ‘Repository’ button in the top navigation bar (see image below).

This new feature allows you to browse the general document library from within share. You have a number of ways to navigate and find content. These include:

• Repository – Traditional folder hierarchy view
• Categories – Browse using the assigned category hierarchy
• Tags – Select content based on the tags assigned
• I’m Editing – Quickly find documents that you are in the process of modifying
• My Favourites – Quickly find documents that you have flagged as important to you

(see image below)