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Alfresco 3 Cookbook
Alfresco 3 Cookbook

Alfresco 3 Cookbook: Over 70 recipes for implementing the most important functionalities of Alfresco

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Alfresco 3 Cookbook

Chapter 2. Creating and Organizing Contents

This chapter will cover:

  • Creating a space

  • Creating content

  • Uploading a document

  • Viewing content details

  • Tagging content

  • Categorizing content

  • Making a document versionable

Introduction


Alfresco is a Content Management System ready for your Enterprise. You can store and manage your contents in a logical collection named Spaces. In your desktop, you store your files and documents in folders. In other words, folders or directories help you organize your files. Similarly, in Alfresco also, you store and systematize your contents in various folders. In addition to storing contents, spaces in Alfresco can execute scripts and actions as well. We will explore this in greater detail in Chapter 4.

As your document management system, Alfresco enables you to upload documents, set the details of your documents, tag or classify your documents, and manage the versions of the documents.

In this chapter, you will learn how to use the Alfresco Explorer application to create and organize your contents using spaces, as well as how to upload and manage the details of the documents.

Content metadata

Metadata is "data about data". Content metadata is the details or information about...

Creating a space


In Alfresco, spaces are logical collections of files and contents. We will learn how to create a new space in this recipe.

Getting ready

In order to create a space, we need to open the Alfresco Explorer application.

  1. 1. Open the URL in your browser http://localhost:8080/alfresco.

  2. 2. Login using the default administrator user credentials provided by Alfresco. Username: admin. Password: admin.

  3. 3. Click on Company Home or My Home in the top left navigation toolbar.

This opens up the root space of Alfresco.

How to do it...

  1. 1. Click on Create Space from the right links.

  2. 2. The New Space creation form appears. Fill up the Name, Title, Description of the new space you want to create and click on Create Space. Choose the icon you want to associate with your space from the available list of icons.

  3. 3. Your new space has been created.

How it works...

Quite simply, Alfresco creates the space with the parameters provided by you in the Create Space form. The current user has to have the required permission...

Creating content


After creating space for storing your contents, it is now time to create content. Contents in Alfresco can be created in two ways—create the content using Alfresco Explorer editors or upload an existing content from your computer.

In this recipe, we will see how to create content using the Alfresco Explorer.

How to do it...

  1. 1. Click on Create Content from the right links.

  2. 2. The form to populate the name and type of the content appears.

  3. 3. Provide the name of your new content. The Type parameter defines the content and Content Type parameter defines the mime-type of the new content.

  4. 4. By default, only Content is available as the Type. However, you can create your custom types easily. Custom types are useful when you want to create and associate new properties, new behaviors with your content.

  5. 5. And Alfresco offers simple contents to be created by the Explorer interface—plain text, XML, and HTML. Alfresco Explorer comes with a simple WYSIWYG HTML editor (TinyMCE), which helps...

Uploading a document


You have just learnt how to create content using Alfresco Explorer and populate it. However, this process can only create textual, XML, and HTML documents and contents.

Of course, you have other types of files and documents in your disk such as images, office documents, audio, videos, and so on—which you want to put into the Alfresco repository. The editors of Alfresco Explorer won't help you to create and edit such documents. In addition, you must be able to upload the existing files into the repository for enabling document management, and so on.

This recipe will help you understand how to upload your existing documents from your disk into the repository.

How to do it...

  1. 1. Start with opening the space in Alfresco Explorer where you want to upload your document and click on Add Content.

  2. 2. File upload control will appear, click on Browse, and select the file you want to upload in this space.

  3. 3. Property sheet editor opens up, where you can set the name and type of the file...

Viewing content details


The folders you have created and the documents you have uploaded in Alfresco have several properties and other behaviors associated with it. You can also perform several other operations over content—such as copy, delete, move, download, check-in, check-out, and so on.

In this recipe, we will explore the operations that can be executed over contents and how to do it.

Getting ready...

Open a particular space where the contents are uploaded on which you want to perform certain operations.

In our case, we will navigate to the sample InfoAxon space where we had earlier uploaded the contents and created a space.

How to do it...

  1. 1. We choose the About InfoAxon.html content here. Click on the View Details icon.

  2. 2. Screen opens up displaying the details of this content.

  3. 3. All the operations you can perform on this particular content are displayed here along with the properties and metadata of this.

    • Manage Content Custom View: You can display formatted custom information associated...

Tagging a document


A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword associated with a content or document. Tag is part of the metadata set of a document. A tag helps describe content, and enables keyword-based classification and easy search of information.

In a content management system, it is important to tag content or a document so that finding the actual content becomes easy and accurate.

How to do it...

  1. 1. Open a particular space into which the document resides that you want to attach tags to.

  2. 2. Here, we will use the same About InfoAxon.html content we used in previous recipe. Click on View Details and open the details page of the content.

  3. 3. Alfresco offers the taggable aspect. Associating this will introduce the capability of attaching tags to a document. By default, this aspect is not associated with the uploaded or created documents, and thus tagging is not enabled for a document uploaded in Alfresco. Hence, we need to associate this aspect first in order to attach tags with this document.

  4. 4. Click...

Categorizing content


Categorization enables contents to be grouped and classified. Categories are normally structured as per the organization business taxonomy.

For example, Alfresco comes with a default set of categories which you can use—

  1. 1. Regions

  2. 2. Software Document Classification

  3. 3. Languages

You can create your own categories and classify your documents with those. <<Alfresco administrators can only define new categories other users don't have rights to define new categories in alfresco>>

Getting ready

Let's first have a look at the available categories.

  1. 1. Click on the Administration Console link on the top bar.

  2. 2. Click on Category Management. The list of root level categories comes up.

  3. 3. Except for the InfoAxon Solutions, other categories are supplied by default.

  4. 4. This is the Software Document Classification category hierarchy.

We will use this category further in this recipe.

We again take the About InfoAxon.html document to categorize.

How to do it...

  1. 1. Open the details screen...

Making a document versionable


As a software developer, you must be aware of version control of your code. Controlling, managing, and maintaining the history of document versions is equally important in the context of a document management system.

Imagine that you are writing the requirement document on the newest project you are working on. A number of people will probably be involved in writing and validating this; and thus a number of iterations will be taking place for constructing the document and before the document is ultimately finalized. So how will you be able to manage all the versions of the document? Obviously, it is quite difficult to name the document as per the version and change the name every time the version is changed. What happens if you have reached version number 100? You need a version control-enabled document management system. Alfresco provides exactly that and much more beyond that!

How to do it...

  1. 1. We once again take the About InfoAxon.html document to apply and...

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Key benefits

  • Easy to follow cookbook allowing you to dive in wherever you want
  • Convert ideas into action using practical based recipes
  • A comprehensive collection of alfresco recipes covering the API, Freemarker templates, external integration, web client, and much more

Description

Alfresco is the renowned and multiple award winning open source Enterprise content management system which allows you to build, design, and implement your very own ECM solutions.You have read a number of tutorials, blogs, and books on Alfresco. Now you're in the real world, trying to use Alfresco, but you’re running into problems with it. This is the book you want. Packed full of solutions that can be instantly applied, this cookbook with its practical based recipes and minimal explanation meets that demand.This Alfresco 3 cookbook boasts a comprehensive selection of recipes covering everything from the basics to the advanced. The book has recipes for quickly installing Alfresco in Windows and Linux and helping you use custom content model, rules, and search. There is also a collection of recipes focused on creating Scripts, Freemarker templates, Web Scripts, and new workflow definitions. Steps to integrate Alfresco with other systems like MS-Office are also included. You will be able to use Alfresco’s File and Email servers. Finally, step-by-step recipes are presented to create an Alfresco build environment and compile the source code. This Alfresco 3 Cookbook is perfect for developers looking to start working on Alfresco quickly, gain complete understanding, write custom implementations, and achieve expertise very easily.

Who is this book for?

If you are a software developer interested in content management systems, who wants to work with Alfresco or is already experienced in Alfresco, this cookbook will get you up and running quickly. If you want rapid implementation of Alfresco’s most important and effective features then this is the cookbook for you.

What you will learn

  • Configure your Alfresco server all without direct installer
  • Create, arrange, manage, secure, search, and expose content
  • Make your content storage business rules aware
  • Troubleshoot and integrate Alfresco with other enterprise systems and applications
  • Write your own services and solutions using Alfresco APIs
  • Integrate with your corporate systems and build an enterprise solution environment with Alfresco

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Jul 26, 2011
Length: 380 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849511087
Vendor :
Alfresco
Languages :
Concepts :
Tools :

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Product Details

Publication date : Jul 26, 2011
Length: 380 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849511087
Vendor :
Alfresco
Languages :
Concepts :
Tools :

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Table of Contents

14 Chapters
Getting Started Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating and Organizing Contents Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Securing and Searching Contents Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Rules—the Smart Spaces Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Alfresco Administration Console Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Customizing Alfresco Web Client Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Alfresco Content Model Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Alfresco JavaScript API Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
FreeMarker Templates Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Web Scripts Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Working with Workflows Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Integrating with MS Outlook and MS Office Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Configuring Alfresco E-Mail and File Servers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building Alfresco Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
(3 Ratings)
5 star 0%
4 star 100%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Subhash Chandran Sep 18, 2011
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I am a fan of the Cookbook format. It is a quick way to learn a subject / product and helps us to get hands on immediately. Alfresco especially, being a complex product with diverse features is learned quickly in this format. There is also a tendency for authors to misuse this format by missing out concepts behind the quick hands on steps. I would like to congratulate the author, Snig Bhaumik, for making excellent use of this format without sacrificing the conceptual information.The book covers version 3.3 of Alfresco. Topics covered include installation, content organization, Alfresco Explorer (for old timers: new name of Web Client), Search, Rules, Web Scripts and Workflows. Among the third-party product-integration covered are MS Outlook and MS Office. There is also a dedicated chapter on configuring Alfresco to send and receive emails, and exposing Alfresco contents using other protocols like FTP and CIFS. As you see, the book covers quite some features of the product. The author uses relevant screenshots and numbered steps to explain configuration and development. Also, the examples chosen by the author are simple and explain the topic in surprisingly concise manner. There is also a section on building Alfresco, which I found to be an odd inclusion in this book: the book did not cover anything about Java-based development, and I found this to be irrelevant to the context of the book.To those who has not seen the TOC of the book, the scope of this book does not cover:=> Alfresco Share: The book has a section on Share. The author also informs the reader about the possibility of Share replacing Alfresco Explorer in future. Personally, for this one reason, I would have loved to know more about Share. If there is a future edition of this book, I would love to see extensive coverage of this module.=> Alfresco Web Content Management (WCM): There seems to be some uncertainity about WCM. And the book does not cover this topic.=> Java based extensions: The book does a good job of explaining Web Scripts and Workflows, but does not explain extending them with Java---the examples are with JavaScript.=> The Workflow chapter does a very good job of explaining jBPM based Workflow. But there is no mention of Activiti, and new preferred Workflow engine for Alfresco.Some of these omissions I agree with author not being in the scope of the book (like Java-based-extension and WCM), but I would have loved to more coverage of Share.Now to the editorial drawbacks (which mires most of the Packt books I have read). There are couple of places where it is mentioned that Web Client is now named Alfresco Explorer, but we have a chapter whose name has Web Client. In page 133, a section is full of annotations the author had made for filling in content later (with text like "please give reference to future workflow section here"). Hope Packt does some improvement in this area.Overall, I gave this book a rating of 4 stars. The book really succeeds in explaining the concepts it covers very effectively. I would say, this book along with the bit dated Alfresco Developer Guide is among the best books on Alfresco. I also sincerely hope that the author keeps updating the book along with new versions of Alfresco.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Johnny Gee Oct 01, 2011
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
If you are a first time Alfresco developer and have not read many books on Alfresco, Snig's cookbook is an excellent reference. If you have read other Alfresco books, about half the material will be familiar and is what you would typically find in Alfresco tutorial. If you have already implemented several Alfresco applications, go directly to the workflow chapter; you probably already know the solutions/sample code presented in the rest of the cookbook.The other reviews about this book cover the technical details. I would like to high-light Snig's writing style of "providing minimum theory...maximum action". Snig approach to presenting problems to solve and solutions/sample code to solve involves the following:1) Getting Ready (intro to the problem)2) How to do it (instructions/solution overview)3) How it works (technical explanation of the solution)4) There's more (optional supplemental info).Sample code is great for users who are not interested in learning to build Alfresco solutions. Snig's "How it works" section presents the secret sauce on what the sample code does and how it solves the problem. I strongly believe that explaining how to solve the problem is more valuable than the actual solution itself. Snig does a good job of explaining the solutions he presents throughout the book.I would recommend this book to someone who was asked to start building a prototype tomorrow. If you are planning to learn Alfresco as profession, there are other books about Alfresco that cover the theory in more detail.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Darryl Staflund Aug 27, 2011
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Alfresco 3 Cookbook (Packt, 2011) is the latest in a series of books on Alfresco ECM that Packt Publishing has released since 2008. Snig Bhaumik, the Technical Director of InfoAxon Technologies Ltd., wrote the book to give software developers wanting to work with Alfresco a comprehensive selection of development recipes covering everything from installing Alfresco in Windows and Linux to compiling Alfresco from source code. The book comes in at 380 pages (and fourteen chapters) and can be purchased in paper and electronic format (PDF and ePub) online or in stores.Chapters One through Five explain how to download and install the Community Edition of Alfresco and then use Alfresco Explorer to create and organize, secure and search, and ultimately administer content placed in the repository. Chapter Four is especially rewarding, providing not only a conceptual introduction to Rules, but also a rich catalog of the actions and conditions that go into the making of them. Chapter Five is also valuable for its explanations on how to use the Content Packager to import and export content to and from the repository, and how on to use the Node Browser to retrieve information about content.Chapters Six through Eleven get into Alfresco development. It starts off with a discussion on how to customize the appearance and display of Alfresco Explorer (Chapter Six) and then delves into the creation of content models, a topic at the heart of Content Management (Chapter Seven.) The Alfresco Javascript, Freemarker, and WebScript APIs are covered in Chapters Eight through Ten, respectively, and Chapter Eleven introduces workflow automation using JBoss jBPM, a workflow engine that comes embedded with Alfresco. In all these chapters, the author makes sure to explain how to deploy solutions to the Alfresco server, and how to integrate these solutions with the Alfresco Explorer interface.Chapters Twelve and Thirteen cover a number of different ways in which Alfresco integrates with end-user applications such as Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office as well as email and file servers. Chapter Fourteen completes the book with a description on how to checkout and build the Alfresco Community Edition from Alfresco's public SVN repository.Like other Alfresco books that have come out in the last three years, some of its information is dated due to ongoing development of the product. As of Alfresco Community 3.4e, PostgreSQL replaces MySQL as the default database, and iBatis replaces Hibernate as the default ORM. And in the upcoming Alfresco Community 4.0 release, Activiti is being touted as the embedded workflow engine of choice ahead of JBoss jBPM. Although substantial, most developers will take these changes in stride.I have a single request that I would like address to the Quality Assurance team at Packt Publishing - please take the time needed to address the grammatical shortcomings of your books. Oftentimes when I buy a book from Packt Publishing, I find more than just a few grammatical errors in the book. Don't get me wrong - the books that Packt publishes are helpful to developers and deserve to be published. But Packt has the responsibility of working with their authors to address these issues before they go to press. No one likes to buy a book with grammatical errors in it.So this, in a nutshell, is Alfresco 3 Cookbook. It makes a good developer companion alongside other books like Alfresco Developer Guide (Packt, 2008), Alfresco 3 Business Solutions (Packt, 2011), and Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) (Wrox, 2010.)But there is more to Alfresco than what has been covered in this book. So I heartily recommend that the author consider publishing an advanced Alfresco cookbook on topics such as the use of Alfresco Policies to implement business rules, the use of Alfresco's Auditing framework to implement history beyond that of document versioning and workflow, release management strategies using Alfresco Modules, and, of course, the upcoming Activiti and Solr integrations. Such a book would be a very welcome contribution. Alfresco 3 Cookbook (Packt, 2011) is a good book and I recommend it to anyone learning to work with Alfresco.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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