Looking for suitable way to customize Alfresco share - alfresco

Question

I have a unique requirement by my company to have a page for each sub-folder in a particular folder of alfresco share. So basically there would be hundreds of sub-folders and corresponding hundreds of pages representing it. The page for that folder should have links to its sub-folders and maybe even documents within it in the form of a collapsible list as shown:
Folder 1
-Category 1
Doc 1
Doc 2
-Category 2
-Sub-category 1
doc 3
I want to have something like shown above on one side of the page and the other side should have all the recent activities related to the folder, like who added a doc, what edits were made, were there any comments, etc. I searched a lot related to this but I am not sure if alfresco supports this kind of customization. I found some really good tutorials on creating custom pages in share using JSON widgets but don't think it would help in this case. Other option would be generate an html page for every new folder created and populate it using javascript. But this method won't have much flexibility in terms of designing the page. Does anyone know of a better approach or idea for this requirement ? I would really appreciate any thoughts on this.

Answer 1

I'll just write it as an answer (relating to my previous comment). I've done something similar in this way (using the link provided in the comments:
create a simple alfresco web script that returns a json of what you need (in you case recently modified documents). I've done it with listing a folder, this is mywebscript.get.json.ftl:
{
"docprop" : [
<#list companyhome.childByNamePath["MyFolder"].children as child>
{
"name" : "${child.properties.name}" ,
"author" : "${child.properties["cm:author"]}",
"CreatedDate" : "${child.properties.created?datetime}"
}
<#if child_has_next> , </#if>
</#list>
]
}
create Share widget controller file where you call this web script with retrievedoc.get.js:
var connector = remote.connect("alfresco");
var data = connector.get("/mywebscript.json"); //the url is declared in your `mywebscript.get.desc.xml`
// create json object from data
var result = eval('(' + data + ')');
model.docprop = result["docprop"];
create Share widget presentation template with retrievedoc.get.html.ftl:
<div class="dashlet">
<div class="title">${msg("header.retrievedocTitle")}</div>
<div class="body retrievedoc">
<table>
<tr>
<th>Name: </th>
<thAuthor: </th>
<th>Created: </th>
</tr>
<#list docprop as t>
<tr>
<td>${t.name}</td>
<td>${t.author}</td>
<td>${t.CreatedDate}</td>
</tr>
</#list>
</table>
</div>
You then need to register your widget in Share, and use it in your dashboard. It will call the Alfresco script and populate the widget with the results. Obviously you need to change your Alfresco script to return recent activities (you could make a query like: all documents modified in the last 24 hours, or something like this. But the method is the same.
Hope it helps.

Answer 2

You could create new folder tree component in alfresco share to meetup your requirement.
Alfresco share page madeup of multiple comoponents which are kind of self sufficient components in terms of data and dependancy(Excluding few alfresco common dependancy).
Here is the outline for the approch
Create one folder tree comopnent in alfresco, which will be nothing
but a webscript which render related webscripts output on page in
which component is included.
Create one Dynamic YUI tree with some dummy data and check weather
you are able to generate or not.(Just to make sure you have all
depenency included).
Create one data webscript on repository side which will fetch folder
structure related data from repository.Make it in such way that if
you pass folder noderef if will return all childrens under
that.There is one similar webscript also avilable out of box may be
you could reuse that.
Once you have that webscript working properly call that repository
webscript to populate your dynamic tree and remove all dummy data.
I hope this gives you good starting point.
You will certainly find documentation for each of these steps.