topic Re: Lingering node references in Alfresco Archive

Lingering node references

petern — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:16:54 GMT

Hi all,We have been developing a document repository using Alfresco and have come across two weird 'phantom node reference' issues. I would be grateful if anyone could shed some light no the matter or point out what it is that we've just totally overlooked in either case.Firstly:We have developed a

Re: Lingering node references

kumbach — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:37:28 GMT

I don't have an answer for you, but thought that I'd mention something I ran across as it sounds suspiciously similar to what you're seeing…

We had a webscript that ran every minute via the Quartz scheduler inside Alfresco. It's job was to watch for documents that arrive in a space named "Inbox". When something new arrived, the script would simply move the document into another space based on some business logic.

We wanted to implement the Inbox idea to avoid having to give users add permission on all the spaces in the repository. We have 80,000+ spaces and setting permission on all those spaces was something we wanted to avoid.

The Inbox webscript used a Lucene query to find new Inbox documents. What would occasionally happen was that after a document had arrived in the Inbox, and was moved to a new space, the Lucene query would later report that the document is still in the Inbox. When trying to refile the document again, the script broke because the document doesn't really exist in the Inbox and all kinds of errors then occurred.

As a side affect, the Alfresco GUI also showed the problem document as still being in the Inbox. However, when using the Node Browser to navigate to space where the document should be, it appears to have been refiled correctly.

I suspect this is an Alfresco indexing bug but haven't been able to prove it.

We eventually gave up on the Inbox idea and resorted to setting permissions on all the 80,000 spaces and then allowed users to save document directly in the other spaces.

Anyway, I hope this info is useful to you and maybe to other people as well.

Re: Lingering node references

petern — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 09:18:29 GMT

Hi, thanks. At least it somewhat confirms that the problem exists - it does sound similar.

Interestingly, node collections available to and hence file lists generated by templates and webscripts seem to be immune. Try creating a simple template which lists a folder's contents and see if moved nodes show up there? It would be interesting to see if that works for you too. Unfortunately it doesn't yet seem to be possible to link to an action in a webscript, otherwise this problem could be entirely worked around using the webscriptable aspect.

As there seems to be no quick way around this, my solution in the end was to modify the evaluator for my action's links so that it would, from the node under scrutiny, work up the node hierarchy from each node and at each level test if this is the 'Document Store' node then fail if this was the case. Somewhat slow, but it prevented data loss.

How did you manage to set the permissions on all those spaces - presumably programmatically!

Re: Lingering node references

kumbach — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 17:52:45 GMT

We've implemented our own front-end to Alfresco so we don't use templates, actions, etc. Thank goodness for that because I find each of these features in Alfresco (and others too) has some quirk or bug that always seems to mess us up.

Yes permissions are set using a program, that's just way too many spaces to maintain any other way…