Introduction

Contents in Alfresco can be defined as any document, file, or folder created in the repository and content models are the structure of these contents. Alfresco content models are defined in the Data Dictionary as meta-model. The meta-model consists of two main structures—Content Type and Content Aspect.

The following diagram depicts a logical design of the content model architecture:

Content Type

Content Type is the fundamental structure of a content item. It defines the composition of properties and behaviors of a content item. Much like in the object-oriented programming model where an object always has to be of a defined class type, in Alfresco an item has to be of a defined type also. The content types in Alfresco abide by the inheritance construct of a object-oriented programming model.

There is a root content type defined in Alfresco, all other content types are created inheriting this root type—cm:content or http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}content.

Thus, whenever...