Tag: Alfresco Add-On

New version of Alfresco Rule Management

There is a new version of Alfresco Rule Management available. The core purpose of the add-on is to make it easier to work with rules programmatically. For example, using the add-on you can easily convert existing standalone rules to shared rules or move rules from one folder to another.

The new release, 1.1.0, includes a small but handy feature: It adds an API for retrieving a JSON representation of all the rules set on a specified folder. The response includes everything you could ever want to know about the rules, including the conditions, actions, and parameters.

There are a variety of use cases for this. One recent client uses it to index all of their rules into a search engine so they can see how rules are being used across their repository.

As always, if you find an improvement you’d like to see in this add-on, pull requests are welcome.

Quick Hack: Restricting Create Site Links to a Site Creators Group

At Alfresco Summit 2014 there was a wonderful session from Angel Borroy called, “10 Enhancements That Require Less Than 10 Lines of Code“. If you missed it you should follow that link and watch the recording.

Angel said the talk was inspired by my blog post about an example add-on I created that allows you to define default folder structures that get populated in the document library when you create a new site (see share-site-space-templates on GitHub).

One of the other 9 enhancements Angel showed was how to hide the “Create Site” link. I’ve seen so many of my clients and people in the forums asking for this functionality, I decided to enhance it a little bit, put it in an AMP, and make it available on GitHub. You can download share-site-creators and try it out for yourself.

Here’s a little more about how it works…

Instead of hiding the “Create Site” link from everyone but administrators, my add-on allows you to create a group that is used to determine who can create sites. The group, appropriately enough, is called “Site Creators”. If you aren’t in that group, you won’t see the “Create Site” link in any of these places:

  • The Sites menu
  • The “My Sites” Dashlet
  • The “Welcome” dashlet

Additionally, the add-on changes the underlying permissions at the repository tier so that if your teammates are hackers, they cannot circumvent the user interface and create their sites using other means.

The screenshot below (click to enlarge) shows what it looks like when you aren’t a member of the Site Creators group:

The Share Site Creators add-on restricts the Create Site link to a specific groupYou might notice that the text of the “Sharing” column in the welcome dashlet also changes to be more applicable to someone who cannot create their own sites.

The new text is in a properties file. Currently I have only an English version, so if any of my multi-lingual friends want to translate the new string, that might be useful to others.

Just like my Share Site Space Templates add-on, this one is not mind-blowing. But it is useful, both in terms of functionality, and as an example of how to override Alfresco Share web scripts without copying-and-pasting tons of code.

I’ve tested this with Alfresco 4.2.f Community Edition. If you want to get it working with other versions, or you have other improvements, bring on the pull requests!