I can’t believe I didn’t know about this sooner. It completely passed me by. Patrice Collardez created an extension for cmislib that gives it the capability to work with aspects. Patrice’s version works with cmislib 0.4.1. I cloned it and made the updates necessary for it to work with cmislib 0.5.

What this means is that you can now use Python and cmislib to work with Alfresco aspects. Patrice’s extension adds “addAspect”, “removeAspect” and “getAspects” to Document and Folder objects. It also allows you to call getProperties and updateProperties on Folders and Documents even when those properties are defined in an aspect.

Check it out:

properties = {}
properties['cmis:objectTypeId'] = "D:sc:whitepaper"
properties['cmis:name'] = fileName

docText = "This is a sample " + TYPE + " document called " + NAME

doc = folder.createDocumentFromString(fileName, properties, contentString=docText, contentType="text/plain")

# Add two custom aspects and set aspect-related properties
doc.addAspect('P:sc:webable')
doc.addAspect('P:sc:productRelated')
props = {}
props['sc:isActive'] = True
props['sc:published'] = datetime.datetime(2007, 4, 1)
props['sc:product'] = 'SomePortal'
props['sc:version'] = '1.1'
doc.updateProperties(props)


Also, if you saw the webinar yesterday you know I showed some Python examples in the shell, but I then switched over to some OpenCMIS Java examples in Eclipse that I included in the custom content types tutorial. I didn’t want my fellow Pythonistas to feel neglected, so I ported those OpenCMIS examples to Python. Grab them here.

The examples assume you also have Patrice’s extension installed (my clone if you are using cmislib 0.5). If you don’t want to use Patrice’s extension for some reason, just comment out the “import cmislibalf” statement as well as the lines in the createTestDoc method that deal with aspects and aspect-defined properties. You should then be able to run the examples in straight cmislib.

If you don’t have cmislib you can install it by typing “easy_install cmislib”.