Radio Liferay Episode 11: Alexander Chow and Sergio González about Document/Media Library

Liferay for your ears - This time I sat together with Alexander Chow and Sergio González. Both are Liferay Core Engineers. Alex is "Employee number 8, UK employee number 1 (which gives away his location) and Liferay-Mac-User number 1".  Sergio is Spain's employee number 6. Both have extensively cooperated in the new Document Library for Liferay 6.1 - now called Media Library - and this provides the main topic for us to talk about:

My shownotes:

• Their background and what they worked on in Liferay
• How to pronounce names
• Naturally: The work both did on Document/Media Library and related portlets through the last year: The document library got a good rewrite, Ajax-based UI and a new backend to use Liferay as entry-point into other external repository systems.
• CMIS (short for Content Management Interoperability Something - see link)
• A lot of the document library backend war developed with JUnit and worked within a few days of work with the independently created UI when they were first brought together.
• Different Document types are now first class citizens, so that you have certain metadata as well as separate workflows for different types of content.
• Document Library and Image Gallery changed to Document and Media Library (for storage) and Media Gallery Display (for presentation) - the data and permissions will be automatically migrated
• Previews for many document types will be automatically generated.
• Listing alternative interfaces to the backend: Browser, WebDAV, Sharepoint protocol, Liferay Sync
• Sync will work offline and synchronize any change (bidirectionally) with Document & Media Library when it's online, available for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS. Sadly there's one OS missing...
• Iliyan is now europe's resident AlloyUI/JS expert
• Download Beta 4 (or whatever is current when you read/listen to this) and give feedback, report bugs before Alex 2.0 is released.

You'll find this episode - and make sure that you don't miss any of the future episodes - by subscribing to  http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioLiferay with your favourite podcatcher. You can also subscribe on itunes.: Just search for "Radio Liferay" or just "Liferay" in the podcast directory.

Obligatory Twitter Links: Alex, Sergio, me and RadioLiferay

[Oliver Hagmann]

I'm not a developer myself but support users of a Liferay 6.06 (CE) portal in our company. We link to documents and images from Wikipages. Can you tell me what happens to direct URLs to documents and images when migrating the whole portal to 6.1? Will they break or still work with the new Media Library?

[Alexander Chow]

Hi Oliver,

In our migration of Image Gallery images to the new Documents and Media portlet, we have made ever attempt to preserve support for the older URLs (though some of them we have setup a permanent redirect for, but old links should get to this regardless). So, in general, this should work. If it doesn't then that is a bug.

Hope that answers your question.

Alex

[Oliver Hagmann]

That sounds very promising! Thank you for the fast answer. One thing I didn't quite get in the podcast is if Webdav (which is very buggy in 6.06) will work with the new Media Library Portlet or if Liferay Sync replaces or expands this functionality?

[Alexander Chow]

WebDAV has had several improvements since 6.0.6… especially when using Windows as a client. Liferay Sync does not replace this functionality but complements it. I would recommend you downloading the 6.1 B2 (or better yet, trunk since we are preparing a B3) and seeing if the things you saw before are still problematic.

[Olaf Kock]

Yes, WebDAV is for online access, while Sync replicates to your local disk (and uploads when changed), so there's a fundamental difference - think dropbox(sync) vs. fileserver(webdav) access.
Regarding the Betas: Aren't we already at B4? https://www.liferay.com/downloads

[Alexander Chow]

Good point Olaf! Oliver, download B4!

[Oliver Hagmann]

I already did. Thanks. I managed to get it running and test out the new features but couldn't yet connect the media library via WebDAV via localhost:8080. Don't know if it's a lack of knowledge on my side though. Might have to ask our it support about what might be the issue....

[Alexander Chow]

Hmm… that's discouraging. Check out some of the tips in the wiki, especially under "Known issues."

[Oliver Hagmann]

After installing the mentioned patch on my Win 7 machine, I managed to connect a Media Library Folder. Adding files with Windows Explorer worked fine, opening and editing Excel sheets too (I had to enter my credentials again though when opening the file?). The thing which didn't work was opening an image in Windows Photo Viewer, changing it's orientation and then quitting the Photo Viewer (which was then trying to save the image with its new orientation. I got this message from Photo Viewer: "Windows Photo Viewer can't save the changes to this picture because the file isn't available. The picture might have been deleted or you might have lost your internet connection." When clicking OK on this dialogue and refreshing the Win Explorer window the picture file name is precedented with a tilde (~), the first letter is deleted and the file extension is changed to .tmp. E.g. "picture.jpg" would become "~icture.tmp". I'm pretty sure I didn't lose the internet connection since the test installation is on my machine and I'm connecting over localhost:8080.

[Alexander Chow]

Hi Oliver,

This sounds like a specific problem with how the Photo Viewer works in creating a temp file and everything. If you can create a bug in http://issues.liferay.com, attaching the appropriate portions of your log file, that will help us better respond to this.

Thanks!

[Oliver Hagmann]

I created an issue: <a href="http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-23657">http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-23657</a>. I hope it's the correct log file you were talking about.

[Alexander Chow]

Thanks Oliver. Will track the bug there.

Alex