topic Re: Searchable associations in Alfresco Archive

Searchable associations

grk — Fri, 02 May 2014 13:35:10 GMT

I have implemented my own custom model, and I have a question about associations.I have searched and found that associations are not searchable by Lucene, for performance issues. Yet, consider the following scenario:<ul><li>A list of contacts in a data list <li>A document that need

Re: Searchable associations

jpotts — Fri, 02 May 2014 14:56:36 GMT

This is a bit of a slippery slope. There are ways to work around the problem, as you've observed, but if you get carried away you will have a big mess on your hands. Alfresco simply isn't a relational database so the more you try to treat it like one the more pain you will encounter.

With that said, one option to consider is writing a behavior to sync the data between the nodes. That is a much better approach than using a rule because it happens at a lower level. So, for example, you have a behavior that binds to the onUpdateNode policy of your specific data list type. When it is triggered, it traverses the associations to update the data it needs to update on the related documents.

Hope that helps,

Jeff

Re: Searchable associations

grk — Fri, 02 May 2014 19:01:13 GMT

Thank you very much for your help, Jeff.

So, from what I am given to understand I have to implement a <a href="http://ecmarchitect.com/alfresco-developer-series-tutorials/behaviors/tutorial/tutorial.html" >custom behavior</a> in every datalist type that I might use? Can I develop a behavior where the name of the associated person is loaded on display of the document, rather than implementing an update one?

But putting that aside, is this the correct way to implement a dynamic list? I mean, the very first reason I wanted to do this, was a request for a constraint of values, but not defined in the .xml; instead, we wanted a dynamic list that we can maintain. Is this the best way? Because as I mentioned, I also want to implement content modelling for related documents that are part of an office "case", etc. So, are associations the way to do this?

Re: Searchable associations

jpotts — Wed, 07 May 2014 22:10:45 GMT

Tony Parzgnat did an excellent lightning talk at last year's Alfresco Summit on using data list values for constraints. The recording of that lightning talk session is here: http://summit.alfresco.com/boston/sessions/lightning-talks-2

I believe he intends to open source that code but he has not done that yet to my knowledge.

You don't need associations to do constraints implemented in data lists. I don't really see a reason to maintain that relationship between the selected value and the thing that defines that value. If you want to change the value when the data list value changes, you can do a query to find all documents with the old value, then change it to the new value.

Jeff

Re: Searchable associations

angelborroy — Thu, 08 May 2014 07:16:26 GMT

Take a look at https://github.com/keensoft/alfresco-datalist-constraints

You can find a sample implementation for constraints based on datalists.