Month: January 2014

Updated tutorial: Creating Custom Actions in Alfresco

I have published an updated version of the Creating Custom Actions in Alfresco tutorial. Similar to the recently updated Working With Custom Content Types in Alfresco tutorial, this version has been updated to match the refactored code which now assumes you are using the Alfresco Maven SDK to produce AMPs and that you are using Alfresco Share as the user interface. I’ve removed all references to Alfresco Explorer.

The Custom Actions tutorial covers:

  • What is an action
  • How to write your own custom action in Java
  • How to invoke the custom action from a rule or from the Alfresco Share UI
  • Configuring an evaluator to hide the UI action when certain conditions are true
  • Configuring an indicator to show an icon in the document library when documents meet certain conditions
  • Writing and executing unit tests with the Alfresco Maven SDK

If you aren’t familiar with the Alfresco Maven SDK and you need help diving in, take a look at this tutorial.

All of the tutorial source code and text for the Alfresco Developer Series of tutorials is on GitHub. Please fork the project, make improvements, and send me pull requests.

Next on the to-be-updated list is the Custom Behaviors tutorial. I expect that to go live sometime next week.

Deal of the Day: 50%-off CMIS & Apache Chemistry in Action

The book I mueller_cover150co-authored with Florian Mueller (SAP) and Jay Brown (IBM), CMIS and Apache Chemistry in Action, is 50% off today (January 30). Use code dotd013014au when you checkout.

If you are doing anything with CMIS, whether that is with Alfresco or some other CMIS-compliant Enterprise Content Management server, like Nuxeo, SharePoint, FileNet, or Documentum, you should really take a look at this book. It provides Java, Python, PHP, and .NET examples including a working web application.

Updated tutorial: Working with Custom Content Types in Alfresco

The Working with Custom Content Types tutorial has just been given a major revision. I’ve updated it to match the refactored code. Here is a summary of the high-level changes:

  • Instructions now assume you are using the Alfresco Maven SDK. If you haven’t played with the Alfresco Maven SDK yet, check out my recently published tutorial on the subject.
  • Removed all mention of Alfresco Explorer. The tutorial is now exclusively focused on Alfresco Share for the user interface part.
  • Removed all mention of the Alfresco Web Services API. The tutorial is now exclusively focused on CMIS as the preferred API for performing CRUD functions against the Alfresco repository.

The code and the tutorial text reside in GitHub. If you find issues or make improvements, please fork the repository and send me a pull request.

New Tutorial: Getting Started with the Alfresco Maven SDK

I’ve written a new tutorial about Getting Started with the Alfresco Maven SDK. I hope it helps newcomers to Alfresco get started writing customizations quickly. And if you are an experienced Alfresco developer who still uses Ant-based builds, I hope it motivates you to make the switch to Apache Maven.

The Alfresco Maven SDK is the preferred way to bootstrap, manage, and build your Alfresco modules. The cool thing is that you don’t need anything to get started–if you already have a JDK and Apache Maven installed, you are ready to write custom Alfresco modules for the Alfresco repository and Alfresco Share, whether you are using Community Edition or Enterprise Edition.

The tutorial itself is an HTML page on this site, but I wrote it using Markdown. It lives in a GitHub repository, along with my older tutorials on custom content types, actions, behaviors, web scripts, and advanced workflows. Those tutorials have also recently been converted to Markdown and the accompanying source code has been refactored to use the Alfresco Maven SDK and AMPs, but I am still busy revising the tutorial text to match the refactored code.

I hope that by writing these tutorials in Markdown and storing them in GitHub the Alfresco community will be more likely to help me maintain them over time by forking the repository and sending me pull requests.