topic How to get alfresco objest via CMIS in Alfresco Archive

How to get alfresco objest via CMIS

trinhdc — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 10:19:13 GMT

Hello all, I have investigated CMIS/alfresco to write out a client app. I have investigated CMIS workbench, dotCmis and many threads/articles. After several weeks i get stuck with many confusing. Here are some examples(on Alfresco 5.1 community & one): - I can create several ty

Re: How to get alfresco objest via CMIS

sepgs2004 — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 13:48:32 GMT

With so many things in Alfresco, for a relatively new developer, it can get complicated easily.
I am tempted to ask why you need to know all the types, aspects, etc. Is it a direct requirement or is it for learning more?
A generic question like this may not get answers at all.

As of now, my Alfresco installation is 5.0.d community edition.
On the Alfresco side, using one of the articles by Jeff Potts (http://ecmarchitect.com/images/Alfresco-Developer-Guide-Chapter-3.pdf), I was able to define a custom type with a custom aspect. This custom aspect has a set of properties. Following the article literally, I have prepared two AMP files, one for the repo tier and the other for the share tier.

On my J2EE application side, I use plain and simple CMIS API, using Apache OpenCmis libraries, in order to communicate with Alfresco repository.
As you see in the CMIS cheat sheet, it has methods to get all the objects, etc.
https://www.alfresco.com/sites/www.alfresco.com/files//cmis-cheatsheet.pdf

Other articles that were useful to me:
http://ecmarchitect.com/alfresco-developer-series
http://ecmarchitect.com/images/articles/cmis/cmis-article.pdf

Good wishes to you

Re: How to get alfresco objest via CMIS

steven_okennedy — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 11:47:02 GMT

If I understand your question correctly, you're wondering why (in Share) when you choose to change type on a document you see a small number of types but when you get the list of types back from the CMIS workbench you see a much larger number?

The reason is that Alfresco contains a large number of in-built types for various purposes (some internal, some usable by end users) plus any additional types that you define in custom models. However, there is configuration in Share to choose what types should be exposed in the Share UI - this limits what's pickable on the screen when changing the type of a document. When you create a custom model, the model manager also adds your new custom types to this config on the fly, so they appear here too.

CMIS however, does not look at the Share config (it's not aware of Share at all in fact), it goes straight to Alfresco so you don't get a filtered list, you get a complete list of all types defined in the system.

Unfortunately, because CMIS doesn't take into account Share config, you can't easily restrict the list of types to only the ones shown in Share. There's also nothing different (queryable) about the custom types you create using the Share admin screens, so you can't even use a different CMIS query to select them, unless you hardcode the types you want to get back/exclude or use a naming convention etc, unfortunately.

Same will be true for aspects - the UI configuration filters what Share shows you, so CMIS is giving you a complete list so you'll see more than what's in Share.

Regards

Steven