automated loads into Alfresco

[bacai66]

My question relates to automated loads to Alfresco. We have a pipeline that picks content up from an FTP site and runs it through QAing, storing, transformations etc. Currently the 'store' is a file system but I want to replace this with Alfresco but as the pipeline is totally automated I need the load into Alfresco by automated to. The load would, at its simplest involve:

- Creating a folder
- Loading the files

This will be recursive as there is a package structure plus assorted QA reports.

Initially any existing delivery with that identifier can be deleted and then replaced with a resupply but at some point there may be a requirement to add to version stack rather than replace so again is it possible to automate this.

I would also like to set an attribute to say whether it passed or failed the QA.

Any help in clarifying whether its possible and if it what is involved would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

[pmonks]

Loading content into Alfresco is usually pretty straightforward, due to the virtual file servers functionality (CIFS, WebDAV, FTP and NFS).  All of these access mechanisms are readily usable from automated scripts / processes, and all of them honour any repository level configuration you've done (eg. a rule that turns on versioning for all documents in a particular space).

That said, none of these protocols support the notion of metadata, so if you wish to load content and then manipulate the metadata associated with it, the pipeline will need to use more than just the protocols listed above.  For metadata, I'd suggest using a Web Script (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Web_Scripts) since they're reasonably easy to "poke" from an external process (including shell scripts via wget).

Cheers,
Peter