Liferay w/Alfresco repository

[dustin lastName, modificado 11 Anos atrás.]

I apologize for my naiveté but I'm relatively new to the java world and completely new to Liferay/Alfresco. From what I can tell, Liferay's data modeling is a little more simplistic than Alfresco as it's primary purpose is just to be a portal. However Alfresco's data modeling is more robust and will allows us to better model our domain. If we setup liferay to use alfresco as a repository/data store, do you get CRUD functionality in liferay for the types you define in alfresco, or do you still have to enter the information in alfresco?

What I'm trying to do is model different types for a site, news articles, videos (and associated metadata), image galleries etc. These would all have similar but slightly differing metadata but obviously have similar fields like author, title, view count etc. I saw you can do some basic modeling by creating custom structures, but it seems relatively limiting to the types of things you can do and relationships you can model compared to Alfresco. But the UI of Liferay is so much nicer and I'd prefer not to have our clients have to know anything about Alfresco.

tl;dr – What is the best way to provide CRUD for custom data models (custom types) in Alfresco through Liferay's UI so that our administrators don't have to know anything about Alfresco.

No real version requirements, but currently am working on HEAD of Liferay svn (so 6.2.x?) & alfresco 4.0.x

[Alexander Chow, modificado 11 Anos atrás.]

Hi Dustin,

Welcome to Java and Liferay.

Firstly, while you can create custom "aspects" in Alfresco, these are not exposed to Liferay. While you can mount an Alfresco repository via the CMIS protocol, we do not carry its custom aspects through the CMIS spec. It is not something that is supported by the protocol, per se, but is supported via an extension that Alfresco distributes. OOTB, Liferay is not using that extension and does not plan on using it. The main reason for this is every repository has their own homebrew version of exposing this information and the permutations would be quite large as far as what is available out there. Also, in a later version of the CMIS specification, "aspects" and "mixins" (as other systems call it) is being discussed for support.

In Liferay 6.1+, we do support custom types with different metadata (similar to Alfresco "aspects"), as you have already seen, in terms of the document types. The question I have is what are you trying to achieve with these types that you don't think is supported right now?

Alex

[dustin lastName, modificado 11 Anos atrás.]

The biggest functionality difference I perceive is the relationships you can make. As an example, I may want to model a news article, which might need a relationship to other articles (in the case that it is part 2 in a series of articles), a relationship to its author (which might not be the person who entered it into the system), an association to n+1 images which display as a light box gallery at the bottom of it, which is different from the thumbnail image chosen for the article, and/or an association with a bunch of comments on that article, and those comments being associated with the user who made them.

All I really saw for custom modeling was defining your own structure, was text fields, documents/media and basic types that weren't really representative of relations.

[Alexander Chow, modificado 11 Anos atrás.]

I think this is a concept that is, at minimum, partially there in what we call "related assets". So, when you edit a file entry, you can associate all sorts of assets (message boards messages, wikis, other documents, etc.) to it. While the presentation is not the way you have specified (a light box gallery), they are shown to be related to the given document and easily accessible from that document.