topic Re: URLs! in Alfresco Archive

URLs!

sacco — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 12:38:06 GMT

I'm very curious about the use of URLs in the Alfresco Web Client: the JSF URLs that we typically see when browsing are completely meaningless, and, indeed, my test users frequently send me these in vain,expecting them to guide me to some document or space about whichthey have a query.When I am sent

Re: URLs!

samuel_penn — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:33:23 GMT

Just to add my voice to this, after trying to show a user how to send a link to a discussion forum to people. The problem I ran into here was that not all content even has the 'Page Browse URL' link - discussion forums being one example. Even after managing to find the URL for a location, it is a meaningless string which doesn't say anything about what it is pointing to; it is long and may not be well handled by mail clients such as Outlook (which have a habit of breaking it across lines); and it can't be verbally communicated (at least, not without a lot of pain).

Is there, or are there plans for, a way to display meaningful URLs when browsing Alfresco, so that users can simply mail the link to a page in the way that they expect, or bookmark a location in their browser? Even a simple task like opening a link in a new page doesn't work as expected, and once you do have multiple tabs open, operations don't always apply to the location the user is actually looking at.

Does anyone else consider this an issue? Is there a solution?

Thanks,
Sam.

Re: URLs!

simon — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:46:16 GMT

I second this idea!

The current setup is just bad practice but seems typically JSF behavior. The same is also true for the back button, Alfresco breaks the back button in the browser which is confusing for users. I'm afraid this won't be an easy one but it would be a great improvement!

Re: URLs!

jk3us — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:34:49 GMT

I have to agree… You can't grab links to anything or bookmark a certain place in the repo or use the back button… One way that this could be fixed is by using the hash part of the URL to describe the location, javascript could get/set that and use it to send you to the right place. Facebook uses this technique with success.

This thread is over a year old, has there been any more discussion since then?

Re: URLs!

mikef — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:33:13 GMT

The issues you describe (back button not working, unfriendly URLs, unable to bookmark pages etc) are limitations with JSF . With the 3.0 release, Alfresco introduced a new client (Share) based on a new web application development framework (Surf). One of the drivers for this was to address some of the limitations imposed by JSF including the issues you describe. Share supports bookmarking, end user readable URLs and the back button.