Content Modeling when developing application in Alfresco ECM
When developing applications, you start with a stage of analysis-design that allows modeling the structure of the database that you application will use.
So why not do something similar when developing applications on Alfresco ECM?.
What makes Alfresco ECM a powerful tool is the ability to do content modeling. If you do not that, would not make much sense to use Alfresco ECM and instead should use any file-system such as WebDAV, FTP, NFS, etc.
The content model in Alfresco ECM allows us to identify types of documents, properties and their relationships existing in our organization/business.
This post will explain how to modeling the content that our type of organization/business requires and also explains how to deploy it on an installation of Alfresco ECM.
I. XML definition files
Create the following files:
1. intix-model-context.xml
This is Spring file configuration for the new content model.
[sourcecode language=”xml” gutter=”true” wraplines=”false”]
<?xml version=’1.0’ encoding=’UTF-8’?>
<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC ‘-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN’ ‘http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd’>
[/sourcecode]
2. intixModel.xml
This xml file contains our custom model.
[sourcecode language=”xml” gutter=”true” wraplines=”false”]
<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8”?>
[/sourcecode]
3. web-client-config-custom.xml
This configuration file enables Alfresco Explore/Web Client to load the new content model in the Alfresco UI.
[sourcecode language=”xml” gutter=”true” wraplines=”false”]
[/sourcecode]
II. Deploy the content model
1. Stop Alfresco.
2. Copy intix-model-context.xml to ${ALFRESCO_HOME}\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\extension
3. Copy intixModel.xml to ${ALFRESCO_HOME}\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\extension
4. At this point, you will still not actually can not “see” the new custom model on the Alfresco UI (Alfresco Explorer/Web Client).
For that, you will need to set up the property dialogs for each of the content types.
Then, copy web-client-config-custom.xml to ${ALFRESCO_HOME}\tomcat\shared\classes\alfresco\extension
5. Start Alfresco.
6. Verify successfully deployment of new content model by browsing on Alfresco Explorer/Web Client.
[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”432” caption=”Step 1 - Upload a new type of content”][/caption]
[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”350” caption=”Step 2 - Modify properties (metadata) of new uploaded content”][/caption]
[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”463” caption=”Step 3 - Modify properties of new type content”][/caption]
7. End.