Alfresco 3.2 and Liferay 5.3 observations and help

[pmminov]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to write this post about my findings to help anyone who knows as little as me of Alfresco and Liferay and also asking for help in a few things that I can not make work

I started installing Alfresco from the community full installer, mainly to know how it works, then I deployed Alfresco war along with Liferay for doing SSO and running just 1 server in the future, all that was needed was to tell the repository.properties file to point to the same alf_data folder from the full installer otherwise it won't start saying theres an error related with indexes

Doing this I can use Alfresco inside and outside of Liferay whenever I want

1.- However, when i use the Alfresco inside tomcat the console says that ImageMagick and pdf2swf couldn't be found causing on alfresco the i icon next files and spaces not to work as meant to. I assume those don't come with the alfresco.war, how I include them?

Something else to be considered is that (maybe it was the Liferay checkout I used) the Alfresco css are the last on the list of css files… that in css terms means that what is writen on those files is the final design to be applied, so as soon as the portlet was dropped the whole page absorbed things like font and body, erasing the css folder in Alfresco solved this and made Alfresco look like 1 of my portlets

2.- What was next was SSO, that was when I found an article saying that since it is a JSR-186 portlet it share the same user that is logged in Liferay as long as in both of them exist accounts with the same name and pw like bob/bob but THAT IS NOT WORKING, what I have to do to make it work or I have to use an external solution like CAS?

3.- Finally in both of them CIFS doesn't work, i was reading the documentation and it mention something about subsystems, but I couldn't understand if Alfresco includes a CIFS server or the capability to be one, meaning I need a CIFS server or client. The idea of making CIFS work is that portlets like Wiki or the message boards could attach things right into CIFS

Oh, and theres a bug in mozilla that adds 2 // more to the url, so clicking makes nothing, but in IE it works (well, it says the path couldn't be found in my case)

I have found topics of this subjects mentioned everywhere, most without a solution but that should be worth writting a manual with an standard way to proceed

Hope someone liked this post and hope I get some help on my 3 problems, thanks

[pmminov]

If you want to add Alfresco as a set of portlets the solution, thanks to jonas yuan, is in this link

http://www.liferay.com/web/jonas.yuan/blog/-/blogs/integrating-alfresco-web-client-as-a-set-of-portl...

I got CIFS working now, found this link

http://google-ecm.blogspot.com/2009/11/alfresco-cifs-on-windows-xp.html

There it mentions to create a file-server-custom.xml in alfresco/extension package, but theres already one with the .sample extension, remove that extension and CIFS will be operational, havent tried it on the portlet version insdie Liferay yet, but if WebDAV works on both I guess it will work too

Now just the SSO and the MagickImage and Pdf2Swf missing

[murphyshyamala]

Thanx for the post

The CSS trick really helped

looking forward for the SSO solution

Thanks again

[pmminov]

I completely forgot about this post

Well about the SSO, I've been reading a lot

First, this approach is meant to be called "running Alfresco WEBSCRIPTS as portlets"

This explains why the SSO works for 5 of the 6 portlets, because if u check the portlet.xml they use a JSR-186 web script compliant class, so they do work with the portlet log in, as long as alfresco got a user with the same screename as liferay

HOWEVER

The web content script, got its own authentication mechanism, despite the fact theres a wiki for Alfresco and CAS SSO and that it works, as soon as u deploy this as a portlet it won't work, my closest finding was this post http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=11970, which got no solution

Ye i thought it was something like "since its a webscript all we gotta do is change the authentication filter" but nope, so the final question would be

¿¿¿ How to auth the wcm web script with CAS ??? I got no ideas on how to debug this and check whats the difference between doing CAS inside and outside Liferay

plz anybody….

[murphyshyamala]

rivert logic has a solution but alfresco and liferay must here to different ports

I guess we may have to change the port number in server.xml

http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/AWPr/Documentation#Documentation-Installation

I did not try this one yet, I'm trying to see if alfresco alone can solve my problem.

please let me know if this was any good

[pmminov]

I was trying to set the portlet and I never could set the configuration of it correctly, I made it work with their example portlet but when i tried to use the myspaces example they got it kept saying there was an authentication error, I installed STAr but still kept without working

Also I found that it doesnt display all the objects properly, so I stop looking that way

I would definetely be happy using the My spaces portlet but Liferay got a situation about AJAX and URLs that keeps the upload button from working properly

My only solution would be to use the Web Client portlet, There's gotta be someone who knows how to make CAS work with that specific portlet or why it doesn't work

[pmminov]

Well, today I conclude my search for integration

I want to summarize all my attemps and i hope this thread never dies, maybe go to wiki, and that we all find solutions to this, a standar maybe

- I tried to run the webscripts as Liferay portlets, its pretty simple, information is supplied by Jonas Yuan in his Liferay Blog, and its cool because it makes alfresco part of Liferay

PROS: A bit less time on load, it uses the same resources like JSF libraries and stuff and configuration is 0, just drag and drop
CONS: You can't access Alfresco only anymore, because it uses Liferay's Web Context
TO BE FIXED: There's an error about how URL and AJAX work on this scope, making the upload file button unable to work correctly, prolly Liferay bug, and I was never able to make SSO CAS work properly between Liferay and the WCM portlet (kept dropping me to login(guest)

- I tried AWPr which runs webscripts as well, they got their own site

PROS: You can use alfresco alone or in Liferay, so if you ened to split servers or urls one day this is the perfect solution
CONS: Although they got a wiki I couldn't configure it correctly on my own, it ask you to install things as modules and you got to do that on alfresco.war, I mean all this was a lot of trouble, and never made it work
TO BE FIXED: Better for-dummies wiki and step by step example, they should cover the 6 webscripts available not just 1 as example, some of us are not mere users but not hard developers either

- The winner…. CAS SSO and iFrame…., since i've been diggin and trying this for so long i had CAS, and I could confirm that Liferay and Alfresco worked correctly with CAS (showed login(user)) but running separatedly, i thought why not an iFrame? Both Liferay and Alfresco got sweet Wikis about CAS

PROS: Well documented, it works, and it doesn't generate any problem with JSF libraries, CSS or anything because you are pointing to an application with its own resources (there are no erros from Liferay and AJAX even), and all you need to do is place the URL
CONS: You are loading 2 apps now…. takes heavy time, and is not something to feel proud of, i mean… an iFrame…., will work only if u got CAS SSO set correctly on both sides

Theres also an iFrame approach without CAS, didnt tried it, i like my CAS works with LDAP so im not moving it, the link of this approach is this one http://www.liferay.com/web/guest/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/3456156

Thanks for reading, and all I hope is that if you ever face this problem this helps you, keep feeding this with solutions

CAS SSO and WCM web client is something that should be worked out somehow…

[murphyshyamala]

Hi

congrats looks like you got all figured out

I have tried CAS solution before but that did not work for me

In my case i'm using liferay 5.2.3, Alfresco 3.2 community and tomcat 6.0.18 I have apache directory server configured successfully but I'm unable to configure the CAS server need help with that.

please pass on if you have any information about ifarme 

if you have time can you please give the step by step process

i would like to see this post in wikis

thanks in advance

[pmminov]

You got problems between LDAP and CAS or CAS with LR? or both?

[murphyshyamala]

CAS and LR

there are two thinks I need to figure out
1. setting up CAS
2. configuring it with LR

looking forward for 4 ur reply

thanks