Alfresco One 5.x Developer’s Guide - Second Edition

Table of Contents

Alfresco One 5.x Developer’s Guide - Second Edition

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Why subscribe?

Customer Feedback

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. The Alfresco Platform

Alfresco in the real world

Basic document management

Web content management

Content authoring tools

Separation of presentation from content

Systematic publication or deployment

Alfresco WCM example

Custom content-centric applications

Example used throughout this book

Alfresco architecture

High-level architecture

Add-ons

Open source components

Major standards and protocols supported

Customizing Alfresco

Basic customization

Dashlets

Custom site configuration

Rules and actions

Simple workflow

Advanced customization

Examples of advanced customizations

Extend the content model

Perform automatic operations on content

Customize Alfresco Share

Create a RESTful API

Streamline complex business processes with advanced workflows

Integrate with other systems

Dusting off your toolbox

Understanding Alfresco's editions

Significant feature differences

What's used in this book

Summary

2. Getting Started with Alfresco

Introduction to the Alfresco SDK

Maven archetypes

Install prerequisites

Spring Loaded

JDK

Maven

Install STS

Create your first application

Rapid application development

Traditional approach

Install Alfresco

Download Alfresco

Create your virtual machine

Deploy your modules

Check that your modules are installed

Extending Alfresco

Understanding the extension mechanism

Standard Java web application files

Framework files

Spring configuration files

Alfresco configuration files

Solution-specific files

Avoid Modifying Alfresco Code and Configuration

Troubleshooting

Log4j

Step-by-step - debugging from within Eclipse

Node browser

Starting over

Summary

3. Working with Content Models

Defining SomeCo's content model

Step-by-step - starting the custom content model with custom types

Types

Properties and property types

Constraints

Step-by-step - adding properties to types

Step-by-step - relating types with associations

Associations

Step-by-step - adding aspects to the content model

Aspects

Step-by-step - finishing up the model

Manage property indexing

Modeling summary

Custom behavior

Modeling best practices

Out-of-the-box models

Configuring the UI

Step-by-step - configure Share forms

Step-by-step - adding types and aspects to Alfresco Share dropdowns

Step-by-step - externalizing display labels

Setting up additional locales

Step-by-step - adding properties and types to advanced search

Working with content programmatically

Step-by-step - creating content with JavaScript

Knowing when to save documents

Using JavaScript for batch manipulation

Writing content to the content property

Creating content with CMIS

Step-by-step - run CmisClientClass to create content

Creating associations

Searching for content

Deleting content

Model manager

Summary

4. Handling Content Automatically with Actions, Behaviors, Transformers, and Extractors

Encapsulating content operations in actions

Step-by-step - creating a basic action

Hiding the action from end users

Creating actions that require user-specified parameters

Step-by-step - creating an action configurable in Alfresco Share

Specifying parameters when code executes an action

Binding logic to custom types with behaviors

Step-by-step - writing a simple behavior in Java

Binding to multiple types/aspects

Frequency

Figuring out to which policies to bind

Step-by-step - writing a simple behavior in JavaScript

Binding behavior to child types

Step-by-step - writing a user ratings calculator

Step-by-step - testing the new rating behavior

Handling deleted ratings

Extracting metadata from files

Customizing metadata extractors

Step-by-step - customizing the metadata mapping

Overriding the default mapping

Leveraging out-of-the-box metadata extractors

Transforming content from one format to another

Step-by-step - writing a custom transformer

Summary

5. Customizing Alfresco Share

Knowing when to customize Alfresco Share and when to write your own

Adding new menu items

Step-by-step - adding a simple menu item

Adding new action items

Step-by-step - adding an action item to set the web flag

Restricting the action item by permission

Writing action evaluators to show/hide UI actions

Step-by-step - evaluating whether or not to show the set web flag actions

Changing how Share renders forms

Step-by-step - using a text area field

Step-by-step - changing the Status field on the Details page to display as a Stoplight indicator

Overriding and customizing components

How to use indicators

Step-by-step - creating indicators for the status indicator

How to create metadata template

Step-by-step - create a metadata template for Operations document

Creating custom dialogs

Step-by-step - creating a dialog to publish Whitepapers

Creating custom dashlets

Step-by-step - creating a dashlet listing Whitepapers

Step-by-step - adding filters to your Dashlet

Create custom pages

Step-by-step - create a new page to list all Webable documents

Summary

6. Creating an Angular Application

Understanding the framework

Components

Prepare your environments

Step-by-step – creating the new virtual machine

Creating your first JavaScript application

Step-by-step – develop your first custom UI using the JavaScript API

Creating your first Angular web application

Step-by-step - installing all prerequisites

Step-by-step - creating your first Angular application

Step-by-step - running the Alfresco demo shell

Summary

7. Exposing Content through a RESTful API with Web Scripts

Introducing the Web Script Framework

Step-by-step - Hello World web script

What just happened?

Following the Model-View-Controller pattern

Adding controller logic

Configuring the Web Script Framework

Specifying the HTTP method

Specifying arguments

Specifying the response format

Deploying web scripts

Building solutions with the Web Script Framework

Planning the SomeCo whitepapers and ratings API

Retrieving data with web scripts

Step-by-step - writing a web script to list whitepapers

Debugging

Fast facts

Organizing web scripts

Overriding web scripts

Choosing a URL

Choosing between the repository and the classpath

Step-by-step - retrieving the rating for a whitepaper

Specifying optional arguments

Handling errors

Writing Java-backed web scripts

Step-by-step - writing a Java-backed web script to handle ratings posts

Using the correct ID for Web Script Beans

Using both Java and JavaScript for controller logic

Wiring a web script to UI widgets

Step-by-step - using a widget to post ratings

Implementing the delete ratings link

Adding the web script calls to SomeCo's whitepaper web page

Making other types of content rateable

Dealing with the cross-domain scripting limitation

Handling form data

Step-by-step - implementing a form-based Hello World

Step-by-step - using file upload in a multipart request

Advanced web scripts

Dealing with web script authentication

Controlling web script cache

Summary

8. Advanced Workflow

What is a workflow?

Workflow options

Roll your own

Standalone engines

Embedded workflow engines

Creating process definitions

Step-by-step - creating a Hello World process definition

Using the Activiti graphical process designer

Step-by-Step - using Activiti process designer to create processes

Tokens

Node types

Versioning process definitions

Using alternative deployment methods

Wiring a process to the Alfresco UI

Step-by-step - grabbing the Hello World argument from the user

Understanding workflow-specific content models

Assigning tasks to users and groups

Step-by-step - creating the initial Whitepaper submission workflow

Controlling what actions can be taken from the Task Management dialog

Enabling the Workflow Initiator to Select Users and Groups

Step-by-step - use dynamic user assignment

Adding Logic to Workflows with Listeners and Process Variables

Storing Data in Process Variables

Step-by-step - adding logic to the Whitepaper submission workflow

Getting access to the content in the workflow

Using multi-instances

Using the Activiti API

Step-by-step - implementing third-party review

Making the third-party review more robust

Using timers

Step-by-step - adding a timer to the third-party review

Debugging workflows

Comparing Alfresco workflow options

Summary

9. Amazing Extensions

Configure and use the search manager

Configure and use the Smart Folders

Step-by-step - create your own Smart Folder template

Alfresco mobile

Step-by-step - import and run the Alfresco Sample UI

Step-by-step - create SomeCo mobile application

Summary

10. Security

Authenticating and synchronizing with LDAP

Step-by-step - setting up a local OpenLDAP server

Step-by-step - configuring Alfresco to authenticate against LDAP

Step-by-step - configuring chaining

Setting up Single Sign-On (SSO)

Step-by-step - implementing SSO

Logging Out

Step-by-step - configuring CAS to use LDAP for authentication

Working with security services

Securing the admin user

Granting additional users admin rights

Creating users and Groups Programmatically

Step-by-step - creating users and groups through the Java services

Understanding permission definitions

Permission groups

Permissions

Permission sets

Step-by-step - setting up a publisher custom role

Global Permissions

Mapping Permissions to Methods

Summary

Alfresco One 5.x Developer’s Guide - Second Edition

Alfresco One 5.x Developer’s Guide - Second Edition

Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: October 2008

Second edition: February 2017

Production reference: 1220217

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78712-816-3

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Credits

About the Authors

Benjamin Chevallereau is a French software architect, based in London, who has been working on Alfresco projects for the last 8 years and Ephesoft projects for the last 3 years. He implemented solutions for small companies and global organizations in different domains such as transport, finance, and government.

He has worked for different Alfresco-recognized partners in France, the UK, and USA, including Armedia LLC, Zaizi, Michelin / Wipro, and BlueXML. He is also one of the committers and PMC members of the Apache CMIS Chemistry project.

Jeff Potts is the founder of Metaversant Group, Inc., a consulting firm focused on content management, search, and workflow. Jeff brings over 20 years of Enterprise Content Management implementation experience to organizations of all sizes including the Fortune 500. Throughout his consulting career he has worked on a number of projects for clients across the media and entertainment, airline, consumer packaged goods, and retail sectors.

Jeff began working with and blogging about Alfresco in November of 2005. In 2006 and 2007, he published a series of Alfresco tutorials and published them on his blog, ecmarchitect.com. That work, together with other Community activity in Alfresco's forum, Wiki site, and JIRA earned him Alfresco's 2007 Community Contributor of the Year Award.

In the past, Mr. Potts has worked for Alfresco Software, Inc. as Chief Community Officer, Optaros as Senior Practice Director, and Hitachi Consulting as Vice President where he ran the ECM practice.

About the Reviewer

Bindu Wavell is the chief architect at Zia Consulting. He has been doing enterprise system integration consulting for the past 24 years. At Zia, Bindu provides guidance and mentoring around Alfresco architecture and design in addition to working hands on with customers. He develops processes and technologies to streamline onboarding new developers, delivers trainings for customer developers and provides support for implementations and delivered projects.

I would like to thank the whole team at Zia for providing an amazing environment for learning, discovery and excellence. I’d also like to thank everyone at Alfresco for delivering such a great content management platform and for continuing to focus on being the best in the industry.

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Preface

Alfresco is the leading open source platform for Enterprise Content Management. The evolution of the product has been quite impressive during the last 10 years. The first edition of this book has been published in 2008, and after 8 years, it really needed an update. This new book will give you some insights on the most advanced capabilities of the Alfresco platform. This book takes you through the process of customizing and extending the Alfresco engine, the out-of-the-box user interface Alfresco Share that will suit most of your requirements in terms of document collaboration. It uses a fictitious professional services company called SomeCo as an example. SomeCo has decided to roll out Alfresco across the enterprise. Your job is to take advantage of Alfresco's extension mechanism, workflow engine, and various APIs and SDKs to meet the requirements from SomeCo's various departments. Although many customizations can be made by editing XML and properties files, this book is focused on developers. That might mean writing Java code against the Alfresco API to implement an action or a behavior, maybe creating some server-side JavaScript to use as the controller of a RESTful web script, or perhaps implementing custom business logic in an advanced workflow. The point is that all but the most basic implementations of any ECM platform require code to be written. The goal of this book is to help you identify patterns, techniques, and specific steps that you can use to become productive on the platform more quickly. By the end of this book, you will have stepped through every aspect of the Alfresco platform. You will have performed the same types of customizations and extensions found in typical Alfresco implementations. You’ll have discovered the Mobile Alfresco SDK and creates your own mobile application. Finally, you’ll get a preview of the latest Alfresco Development Framework (ADF) based on Angular. Most importantly, when someone comes to you and asks, How would you do this in Alfresco?, you'll have at least one answer and maybe even some source code to go with it.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, The Alfresco Platform, is for people new to the Alfresco platform. It walks you through the capabilities of Alfresco and gives some examples of the types of solutions that can be built on the platform. You'll also learn what tools and skills are required to implement Alfresco-based solutions.

Chapter 2, Getting Started with Alfresco, is about getting your development environment set up. Like preparing for a home improvement project, this is the trip to the hardware store to get the tools and supplies you'll need to get the job done. Throughout the book, you will be building and deploying changes. So just as in any software development project, it pays to get that process working up front. You'll also learn about the debugging tools that are available to you. The chapter includes a short and simple customization example to test out your setup.

Chapter 3 , Working with Content Models, starts where all Alfresco projects should begin: defining the content model. You'll learn how to define the content model as well as how to expose the model to Alfresco Share. Once you've got it in place, you'll write some Java code that utilizes the CMIS API to test out the model. This will also be your first taste of the JavaScript API. The exercises set up the initial content model for SomeCo.

Chapter 4 , Handling Content Automatically with Actions, Behaviors, Transformers, and Extractors, begins to show you the power of the repository by exposing you to some of the mechanisms or hooks that can be used to perform hands off operations on content. You'll learn about actions, behaviors, transformers, and metadata extractors. The exercises include implementing a rule action for SomeCo's Human Resources department to help manage HR policies, writing a custom behavior to calculate user ratings, and writing a custom metadata extractor to make Microsoft Project files indexable by SolR.

Chapter 5 , Customizing Alfresco Share, takes you through Alfresco Share customizations. First, it establishes whether or not you should be customizing the user interface at all. Once that's out of the way, you learn how to add new menu or action items, how to create your own custom metadata template, how to develop new pages and dashlets, and how to define new dialogs to gather information from a user.

Chapter 6, Creating an Angular Application, shows you how to use the new Alfresco Development Framework (ADF) released in 2016. First, you start by discovering the new JavaScript library that you could include in any of your web applications. Then, you discover the new user interface implemented in AngularJS, and test all available current components. At the time of writing, this framework is only an early release and is not suitable for production. However, we are convinced that this framework will become an important component for any Alfresco developer.

Chapter 7 , Exposing Content through a RESTful API with Web Scripts, focuses on the web script framework. Web scripts are an important part of the platform because they allow you to expose the repository through a RESTful API. The exercises in this chapter are about creating a set of URLs that can be called from the frontend web site to retrieve and persist user ratings of objects in the repository.

Chapter 8 , Advanced Workflows, is about the embedded Activiti workflow engine, how it works and how to define your own workflows, including how to implement your own business logic. The chapter includes a comparison between the capabilities of Alfresco's simple workflow and advanced workflow so that you can decide which one is appropriate for your needs. By the end of the chapter, you will have built a workflow that SomeCo will use to review and approve Whitepapers for external publication.

Chapter 9 , Amazing Extensions, shows you one of the most amazing extensions including the use of facets configured with the search manager. Then, you discover what are smart folders and how to use them. After, you create your own template for SomeCo Whitepapers. Finally, you even create your own mobile application connected to your Alfresco instance.

Chapter 10 , Security, covers a variety of security-related topics. You'll learn how to define your own custom roles, and how to create users and groups with the API. Although not strictly developer-centric, you'll also learn how to configure Alfresco to authenticate and synchronize with an LDAP directory and how to implement Single Sign-On (SSO) between Alfresco and other web resources.

What you need for this book

To work through the examples in this book, you will need:

Alfresco. Preferably Enterprise, but Community should work, except for some advanced chapters. The examples have been tested on Alfresco from 5.1

Spring Tool Suite (STS)

Apache Maven

Vagrant (to create your virtual machines)

Appcelerator (to create your mobile application)

There are other tools or libraries that you will need for certain exercises, which will be mentioned as necessary.

Who this book is for

This book will be most useful to developers who are writing code to customize Alfresco for their organization or who are creating custom applications that sit on top of Alfresco.

This book is for Java developers, and you will get most from the book if you already work with Java, but you need not have prior experience on Alfresco. Although Alfresco makes heavy use of open source frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, no prior experience using these is assumed or necessary.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: Let's clarify what's an AMP file or package. An AMP file is a .zip file with the .amp extension.

A block of code will be set as follows:

{

  rating: {

    average: 1.923,

    count: 13

  }

}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

enableLookups=false

disableUploadTimeout=true

acceptCount=100

scheme=https

secure=true

clientAuth=false

sslProtocol=TLS

keystoreFile=/root/.keystore

keystorePass=changeit

Any command-line input and output is written as follows:

service alfresco start

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: When users log in to Alfresco, the first thing that is usually displayed is the My Dashboard section.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Chapter 1. The Alfresco Platform

This chapter introduces the Alfresco platform and answers the question, "What can I do with this thing?" A few examples will be provided to help answer this question from the solving business problems perspective. The chapter then skims over basic configuration and customization before introducing the advanced customization concepts covered throughout the book. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion on the different Alfresco editions that are available.

In this chapter, we will go through the following points:

Examples of practical solutions built on Alfresco

High-level components of the Alfresco platform

Examples of the types of customizations that you will likely perform as a part of your implementation

Technologies you will use to extend the platform

Alfresco in the real world

Alfresco will tell you that the product is a platform for enterprise content management (ECM). But ECM is a somewhat nebulous and nefarious term. What does it really mean? It depends on who is saying it. ECM vendors usually use it as an umbrella term to describe a collection of content-centric technologies as follows:

Document management (DM): This is used for capturing, organizing, and sharing binary files. These files are typically produced from office-productivity software, but the scope of the files being managed is unlimited.

Web content management (WCM): This is used for managing files and content specifically intended to be delivered to the Web. The key theme of WCM is to reduce the web developer bottleneck and empower non-technical content owners to publish their own content.

Digital asset management (DAM): This is used for managing graphics, video, and audio. You can think of this as DM with added functionality specific to the needs of working with rich media such as thumbnailing, transcoding, and editing. Like WCM, the intent is to streamline the production process.

Records management(RM): This is used for managing content as a legal record. Like DAM, RM starts with DM and adds functionality specific to the world of RM such as retention policies, records plans, and audit trails.

Knowledge management(KM): This is used for capturing knowledge from employees or customers and providing it in a form that others can use.

Case management(CM): This is used managing information related to a case, such as an insurance claim, an investigation, or personnel processing.

Imaging : This includes capturing, tagging, and routing images of documents from scanners.

Most people will also include collaboration, search, and occasionally, portals as well.

Practitioners have a different perspective. They will say that ECM is less about the technology and more about how you capture, organize, and share information across the entire enterprise. For them, the how is more important than the what.

What's important to know from an Alfresco perspective is that Alfresco is a platform for doing all these things.

So rather than worrying about a concise definition of ECM, let's look at a few examples to illustrate how clients are using Alfresco today, particularly in Alfresco's sweet spots such as DM and WCM.

Basic document management

Alfresco started its life as a document management repository with some basic services for document management. Alfresco focused on this smart area initially for two reasons. First, it allowed Alfresco to establish a strong foundation and then build upon that foundation by expanding into other areas of ECM. Second, there is a huge market for systems that can manage unstructured content (aka documents).

The market is so big because document management is a problem for everyone. All companies generate files that benefit from the kind of features document management provides such as check-in/check-out, versioning, metadata, security, full-text search, and workflow.

Examples of classic document management are often found in insurance, manufacturing, packaged goods, or other companies with large research and development divisions. As you can imagine, companies such as these deal with thousands of documents every day. The documents are in a variety of formats and languages, and are created and leveraged by many different types of stakeholders from various parts of the company.

The critical functionality required for basic document management includes things such as:

Easy integration with authoring tools: If users can't get documents into and out of the repository easily, user adoption will suffer. This means users must be able to open and save documents to the repository from applications such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows Explorer, and e-mail.

Security: Many documents, particularly legal documents and anything around new product development, are very sensitive. Employees must be able to log in with their normal username and password, and see only the documents they have access to.

Library services: This is a grouping of foundational document management functionality that includes check-in/check-out, versioning, metadata, and search. The ability to offer these library services is one of the things that sets a document repository apart from a plain filesystem.

Workflow: Quite literally, workflow describes the flow of work or business process related to a document. Requirements vary widely in this area and not everyone will leverage workflows right away. Workflows can be used to streamline and automate manual business processes by letting the document management system keep track of who needs to do what to a document at any particular time.

Scalability/Reliability: The system needs to scale in order to support several hundred or more users and hundreds of thousands or even millions of documents with some percentage of growth each year. Because the repository holds content that's critical to the business, it needs to be highly available.

Customizable user interface: Alfresco is split into two web applications. The first one contains only the core engine capabilities that are required for all Alfresco installation. The second one is the out-of-the-box Alfresco Share client made for generic document management, which may be appropriate in many cases. Most clients will want to make at least some customizations to the web client to help increase productivity and improve user adoption. It's possible as well to develop your own frontend from scratch.

The following diagram shows an example of high-level architecture to understand how basic document management might be implemented:

The diagram shows a single instance of Alfresco authenticating against a Directory Server (such as LDAP). Some content managers are using Alfresco Share via HTTP/S, while others are using Windows Explorer, Microsoft Office, and other thick clients to work with content via one or more protocols such as CIFS, WebDAV, FTP, or SMTP. As noted in the diagram, Alfresco stores metadata in a relational database and the actual content files on the filesystem.

Most of the techniques for customizing Alfresco for DM solutions apply to other ECM solutions such as WCM, RM, Imaging, and DAM. Of course, there are business concepts and technical implementation details specific to each that make them unique, but the details provided in this book apply to all because the specialized solutions are built as extensions to the core Alfresco repository. This books dedicates an entire chapter, Chapter 9, Amazing Extensions, to some very famous extensions as Alfresco Mobile and Alfresco Analytics.

Web content management

On the surface, WCM is very similar to document management. In both cases, content owners store files in a repository. Often, the content is assigned metadata, secured, indexed for search, and routed through a workflow. The most obvious difference between DM and WCM is that the content being managed is meant specifically to be published on a website or as part of a web application. Beyond that high-level distinction, there are several other differences that make WCM worthy of separate discussion. These include:

Content authoring tools used to create content

Separation of presentation from content

Systematic publication or deployment of content

Let's briefly look at each of these.

Content authoring tools

The majority of document management solutions deal with files generated by an office suite. Of