Creating new rule for document transformation

swithun — Tue, 25 May 2010 11:44:47 GMT

I want to be able to use FITS - a technical metadata extractor, on documents that I've ingested into Alfresco. I managed to get this working as a 'Transform and copy content' action. This used a custom class which wrapped a call to the FITS library. It works fine, but I had to create a dummy mimetyp

Re: Creating new rule for document transformation

swithun — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:01:19 GMT

To answer my question, the solution is to use Javascript.

var action_name = "fits-transform";
var act = actions.create(action_name);

act.parameters["mime-type"] = "text/xml";
act.parameters["destination-folder"] = userhome;
act.parameters["assoc-type"] = "cm:contains";
act.parameters["assoc-name"] = "cm:copy";

act.execute(document);‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

This gets all the mandatory parameters declared without having to create a wizard to get the values from the user, or using XML which may necessitate a server restart, or in Java which would require a recompilation. Eventually I found this page in the wiki, which had a good example making things clearer.

I think the action name should match the @id of the bean declared in action-services-context.xml:

<bean id="fits-transform" class="uk.ac.st_andrews.repo.action.executer.FITSTransformActionExecuter" parent="transform">
  <property name="fitsContentTransformer">
    <ref bean="transformer.FitsWrapper" />
  </property>
</bean>‍‍‍‍‍

and the NAME member of the class:

public class FITSTransformActionExecuter extends TransformActionExecuter
{
   public static final String NAME = "fits-transform";
   private ContentTransformer fitsContentTransformer;

   public void setFitsContentTransformer(ContentTransformer trans)
     {
        this.fitsContentTransformer = trans;
     }

   @Override
   protected void addParameterDefinitions(List<ParameterDefinition> paramList)
     {
        super.addParameterDefinitions(paramList);
     }

   protected void doTransform( Action ruleAction, NodeRef sourceNodeRef, ContentReader contentReader, NodeRef destinationNodeRef, ContentWriter contentWriter)
     {
        ruleAction.getParameterValue(PARAM_CONVERT_COMMAND);
        TransformationOptions options = new TransformationOptions();

        if (!this.fitsContentTransformer.isTransformable(contentReader.getMimetype(), contentWriter.getMimetype(), options))
          {
             throw new NoTransformerException(contentReader.getMimetype(), contentWriter.getMimetype());
          }
        this.fitsContentTransformer.transform(contentReader, contentWriter, options);
     }
}‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

The bean says which class should be used for the transformation done by this action class. In the doTransform method, this class has its transform method called. Hopefully this will help anyone else trying something similar.

topic Creating new rule for document transformation in Alfresco Archive

Creating new rule for document transformation

Re: Creating new rule for document transformation