How can we extend the Alfresco database? I need to add new tables to the existing database structure.
Does alfresco support this?
thanks in advance,
sri..
I think changing the alfresco db model is never a good solution. Some alfresco upgrades are made using Schema Upgrade Scripts, and that could get messy.
Have you tried to extend the alfresco content model?
Alfresco support some data types, allowing you to persist data. The Web Script framework allow you manipulate all your data inside your content model.
If your data is not suitable for a "content model", I think you should create a new database to hold your data.
Well, it is just a database. So you can create as many new tables as you want just like you would in any other database.
Obviously Alfresco won't use them because it doesn't know them, but you can query the tables as you like.
Advices from alfresco engineers are do not touch alfresco database. Please take a look at this page.
http://forums.alfresco.com/forum/general/non-technical-alfresco-discussion/where-alfreso-user-details-are-stored-i-alfresco
Changing alfresco database is not recommended.Content Model will be the good way.If such requirement is mandatory than,
You can use spring with hibernate for database connection.Properties which is required for connecting database are all ready declared inside alfresco-global.properties which is located inside "tomcat/shared/classes/".
For Spring bean injection you can declare beans inside any file which ends with "-context" which resides inside "tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension" folder.
I will still recommend developer to use content model.
Depending on your use case, you may or may not need to play directly with the[/a] data base. I think your use case should fall in one of the following:
Use case 1:
You need to setup some metadata on folders and/or documents. You may have to nest multiple levels of nodes with different sets of custom metadata on each level.
You probably need to extend alfresco models in order to define custom document/folder models that best suits your business requirements. Please check jpotts' tutorial to learn how to do so.
Use case 2:
You need to define multiple lists with different sets of properties, those lists may or may not be linked to some content in your alfresco repo.
You probably need to learn more about alfresco sites' datalists, once you do so you may be interested in learning how to extend OOTB alfresco content model, jpotts' tutorial would be a good starting point, and then you should be checking this tutorial in order to learn how to manage datalists in stand alone aikau apps/share pages.
Use case 3:
You need to leverage a relational database in order to define and leverage you complex business logic that do not fall in any of the use cases defined above.
Are you sure you do not want to code a brand new app leveraging a technology that you are familiar with and have it communicate with alfresco using RESTfull api/cmis/.... ?
Are you sure alfresco is THE way to go ? If so, and you still want to have your custom complex business model in a bare relational database:
Please consider using a separate database instance / database for your custom extension, this way you would be sure any new patch/upgrade to alfresco that may change database structure won't affect your extension (or at least wont give you hard time upgrading it)
If you are really tied to only 1 database instance / 1 database schema, you will probably want to precede your table names with some prefix and hope none of alfresco future upgrades would have new tables with the same prefix. You probably also need to make sure to manage your database config wisely (connection pools ..) so neither your alfresco instance nor your custom extension have to starve. (make sure you close the connections you are opening)
Alfresco and Activiti come with a database. It is not good to access the database directly. Doing so can cause unexpected locking behavior or exhaust connection pools on the DB. This turns out into performance problems and other kinds of issues are possible too. In case you want to update Alfresco or Activiti you can do it through APIs. Easy to extend, easy to customize and hassle free integration capability are some of the reasons which has made http://loganwinson.doodlekit.com/blog/entry/4249216/top-things-to-know-about-alfresco-development>Alfresco web development popular among businesses.
Related
I have the main website that uses a database to store and access user accounts. I'm using EF to manage the schema. I also defined site-specific POCOs and have migrated them to the database.
Now, what if I want a separate website, for example, a resource server (Web API) that would expose (with authorization) the same data set up on the main website?
Do I create the same POCOs and derived DbContext on the resource server again? That seems like duplicating work, though.
What if I wanted to create new POCOs on the resource server and reflect them onto that same database? Wouldn't that conflict with the current migration (which is saved on the database), then subsequently mess up the EF setup on the main website?
I've seen the suggestion of putting the POCOs and DbContexts in a library and have multiple projects reference that same library. This seems viable, however I'd have to hard-code the connection string, which seems dirty to me.
I'm starting to think that EF is probably not recommended for this kind of setup. It seems like a database-first approach plays better here - though I would have to manually reedit the data contexts (most likely, LINQ-SQL) for every database schema change.
Are there any lesser-known capabilities, facts, practices, etc., for/about EF that would help in this situation?
Generally, you can avoid duplication by having one API serving both sites and have resources version for each if needed. On the other hand, if you choose reuse and add approach, creating additional EF code-first entities should not interfere with other site data layer if modeled and mapped carefully. DbContext connection string does not have to be hard-coded.
We are going to build custom workflow solution to our clients and most of the time we need to integrate it to their existing system predominately using Microsoft technologies e.g. Exchange Server and SharePoint.
Clients are expecting use workflow to computerize tasks from HR processes, product inventory management. They may or may not have their own CRM but some of them may already using Sharepoint for some processes and they are willing to move away if we can offer a more robust, flexible and economical solution.
I found Alfresco and Activiti very promising but not sure which should I adopt. From my research Alfresco is a full blown CRM with Cloud and workflow (using Activiti as engine) whereas Activiti is the engine on its own.
How should I judge when to go for Alfresco and likewise for Activiti?
TIA
Alfresco is, first and foremost, a repository. If you need a place to store files (either end-users storing files or applications storing files) you should consider using Alfresco as your repository for those files.
As you point out, Alfresco has embedded the Activiti workflow engine. This includes an abstracted service layer that wraps the engine so that, for many operations, when working with Java or server-side JavaScript, you don't need to know much about Activiti. (Obviously you do need to know how to define BPMN 2.0 process definitions to create the workflow).
So if you need to store files and you need to route those files in a business process, Alfresco's embedded workflow engine makes it very easy to do that.
If your primary use case is more general than that (ie, you don't always need to route files in a business process) then you may want to consider a standalone workflow engine. Alfresco can still participate in those workflows, of course, but if your primary use case isn't about files, why go to the trouble of setting up and maintaining a document repository?
In the end, there is no hard and fast rule here. The beauty is that both Alfresco and Activiti are open source. You can try them out, dig into the details, and decide for yourself what is the best fit.
I have just started working on entity framework in an ASP.net application and I was wondering if someone could point in the right direction with respect to best practices. I have some questions in particular which I have listed below.
First of all I am using entity framework 4.0. I already have my database created and so I created a class library and generated the entity model from the database. I had been using Guids generated by the database so I had to modify the ssl to include the attribute StoreGeneratedPattern="Identity". Is there a way to do this automatically or do I have to manually edit the ssl everytime I update the database and the model? (For those of you know are facing a problem with guids or want to know why I am doing this.. this is a clear article on the problem with auto generated GUIDs)
I was planning on using a single file in the class library to hold all the database queries. Is this good practice? How would I ensure different programmers dont rewrite the same queries over and over?
I was planning on using a unique context per method. Is this the right way to go? I read through Rick Strahl's post on context lifetime management. But I am still not sure if a unique context per method is the right way to go.
Can I have my database queries as static methods since they do not make use of any instance variables?
If I use a unique context per method as mentioned in 3 and I wish to modify an entity object returned by one context what would be the best practice? Do I use the attach functionality to attach the object to a new context and save the changes ? I havent tried this but I have read a couple of articles and it seems a bit straightforward but wanted to know if there are any alternatives to this.
If you any suggestions on how you use Entity Framework in an ASP.net application I definitely could use help. This is my first ASP.net/Entity framework application so any tips will help
This was issue in initial version of VS 2010. In some cases this should already work correctly once you have VS 2010 SP1 installed. If it doesn't install this KB.
You can easily get huge class with a lot of static methods. Try to use some separation by the entity type you are querying. You will never fully ensure that another programmer will not create the same query again. This is about correct query naming following same naming policy, documentation and communication among programmers.
Unique context "per method" is usually not needed. In most cases you should be happy with unique context per logical (business) transaction - in case of web application logical operation is in most cases single request processing = one context per request.
If you pass context instance to your queries the answer is yes. Once you don't create them as static and they will take context instance from their class instance you will be very close to repository pattern.
This is exactly problem with context per method and it is hard to solve because to make this work you must first detach entity from the first context and attach it to the second context. If your entity has also related entities loaded all these relations will be nulled during detaching (unless you use deep clone instead of detaching = creating second instance of the entity).
my next assignments is to build 2 information portals for customers. These portals will be login protected sites and contain a set of pages displaying information like orders, invoices, pdf-files ... for the authenticated user (all presented as lists with links to detail pages). The users and the data are stored in an Oracle database. The portals differ in some of the features and in the layout.
My standard approach is to build an individual ASP.net Web Application for every portal.
But this is not the best way to get something reusable. So for these two projects my idea is to create a set of WCF services to get the Data from the Oracle database and to build user controls to display the different elements in Umbraco. This way I hope to get a set of independent, reusable “modules” which can be used to build these portals.
Now my question: is Umbraco a good platform for this type of projects? And is my “concept” a valid approach?
Kind regards
Volkmar
Umbracois very flexible. ON the one hand there is the question about security: With Umbraco you can use any Membership Provider you want for all visitors ( also with member roles).
On the other hand you have the question of the integration: With Umbraco you can create usercontrols, xslts or razor files as macros (which can be seen as the reusable modules).
For Xslt you can implement your own XsltExtension which pulls the external content as XPathNodeIterator you can use in every Xslt macro. For ascx files or razor you can use LinQ2Umbraco, your own objects etc to connect to the oracle database.
You also can use some sort of caching functionality to reduce the db-calls. On the other hand is one of the biggest advantages that Umbraco stores all the content as xml and object tree in memmory. So it is very fast in content rendering. With every database call you are loosing a little bit of this advantage.
hth, Thomas
Ruben Verbourgh began the Oracle4Umbraco project to create an abstracted fork for the Datalayer to support running on an Oracle DB. You can find it at http://oracle4umbraco.codeplex.com/, although it has no active releases, so build from source and YMMV.
Volkmar, your concept is perfectly sound - although you might want to consider using the Umbraco data store as the persistence layer for your data rather than in the Oracle DB itself. You get XML content versioning, caching, and all the benefits of the content-management side of things, in a robust and flexible framework which you can expose to other apps later should you so need to, through the Umbraco APIs and web services.
HTH,
Benjamin
content management of website becomes simplified with Umbraco.
But if you are planning to use Oracle as backend, Umbraco does not have support for it.
So decide carefully as to what parameters can be compromised.
Good luck.
I am in the early stages of planning a conversion of a large classic ASP database application to ASP.Net and I'm having trouble picking out which data access method to use. I have played around with Linq To SQL, Dynamic Data, strongly typed datasets, Enterprise Library (Data Access Application Blocks), and a tiny bit with Entity Framework, but none of them have jumped out to me as "the one". There are just too many choices - my head is swimming, help me choose!
Perhaps it would help to give some background on the application that I am converting along with the priorities...
The back end is Microsoft SQL Server (2005 or later) and we are committed to that, so I don't need to worry about ever supporting a different database platform.
The database is very mature and contains a great deal of the business logic. It is highly normalized and makes extensive use of stored procedures, triggers, and views. I would rather not reinvent two wheels at the same time, so I'd like to make as few changes to the database as possible. So, I need to choose a data access method that is flexible enough to let me work around any quirks in the database.
The application has many data entry forms and extensive searching and reporting capabilities (reports are another beast which I will tackle later).
The application needs to be flexible enough to deal with minor changes to the database structure. The application (and database) may be installed at different sites where minor custom modifications are made to the database. Ideally the application could identify the database extensions and react appropriately. In other words, if I need to store an O/R mapping in the application, I need to be able to swap that out (or refresh it easily) when installing the application and database at a new site.
Rapid application development is critical. Since the database is already done and the user interface is going to closely match the existing application, I'm hoping to find something where we can crank this out fairly quickly. I am willing to sacrifice not using the absolute latest and greatest technology if it will save time in development. In other words, if there is a steep learning curve to using something like Entity Framework, I'm fine with going something like strongly typed Datasets and a custom DAL if it will speed up the process.
I am a total newbie to ASP.Net but am intimately familiar with Classic ASP, T-SQL and the old ADO (e.g. disconnected recordsets). If any of the data access methods is better suited for someone coming from my background, I might lean in that direction.
Thanks for any advice that you can offer!
Look at all three articles in this series:
High Performance Data Access Layer Architecture Part 1
Great advice.
You may want to look at decoupling the database layer from the asp layer so that you can not only give more flexbility in making the decision, but when you have to make changes to a customer's database you can just swap in a new dll without changing anything else.
By using dependency injection you can use xml to tell the framework which concrete class to use for an interface.
The advantage to doing this is that you can then go with one database approach, and if you later decide to change to another, then you can just change the dll and go on without making any changes to other layers.
Since you are more familiar with it why not just go directly to the database at the moment by making your own connections? Then you can move the rest of your code and along the way you can decide which of the myriad of technologies to use.
For a new application I am working on I am starting with LINQ to SQL for it, mainly because development will be quicker, but, later, if I decide that won't meet my needs I will just swap it out.
nHibernate might be a good fit. You can store the mapping in external configuration files which would solve your needs. Another option might be using ActiveRecord, which is based upon nHibernate.
nHibernate has a neat feature which you might find helpful. It's called a Dynamic property which is basically a name value pair collection populated by pulling the column names from the mapping file. So when you add a column at your client site, you update the mapping file and you'd be able to access the data through a collection on the object.