'Change type' dropdown has no options in Document Library

[nadaoneal]

I have a fresh install of Community 3.2 on a 32-bit RHEL 5 server. I'm running Open Office 3.1.0, also freshly installed vi RPM - I installed all the RPMs. ooo.exe and ooo.user point to the correct place in the alfresco-global.properties file, and I don't see any errors in catalina.out or alfresco.log, even though I've turned up the open office connection logging in the log4j file, just success:

11:02:49,184 User:System DEBUG [openoffice.connection.SocketOpenOfficeConnection] connecting
11:02:49,535 User:System INFO  [openoffice.connection.SocketOpenOfficeConnection] connected‍‍

The problem is that when I click "change type" in the document library view of an individual file, say a text or a .xls file, there are no options available in the dropdown menu. Is there someplace I need to register the options? I haven't been able to find any documentation of this sort of problem anywhere.

Thanks for your kind attention.

[gronfelt]

I'm not sure, but my guess would be that the feature is not fully implemented and that the control is only there as a demonstration of how meta data usage could be customized.

[mikeh]

The feature is working fine, but it needs customising when you create your custom models. I'm guessing the "Change Type" action isn't the one you're looking for - what exactly are you trying to do?

For reference, the types.get.config.xml in the slingshot/documentlibrary area of the Repo webscripts should be overridden to supply your own subtypes of cm:content and/or cm:folder.

Note: this is exactly the same out-of-the-box as the Explorer client, which will also have an empty "Change type" action until customised.

Thanks,
Mike

[nadaoneal]

Hey guys, thanks for your replies.

I thought that the reason we need to install open office on the server running Alfresco was that open office gives us the "change types" option - so now we can convert a text file to a PDF or whatever. I got this impression from the installation document (page 22):

"Installing OpenOffice
Within Alfresco, you can transform a document from one format to another, for example, a text file to a
PDF file. To have access to these transformation facilities in Alfresco, you must install OpenOffice. This is
optional, and can be done any time after Alfresco is installed."

… so is using the "convert type" option correct to get this functionality?
… also, is this really the only thing that open office is good for with alfresco?

[mikeh]

OpenOffice is used to provide thumbnails and Flash previews (along with ImageMagick and pdf2swf respectively) for document types such as Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, etc.

Share currently doesn't allow you to perform a manual transformation, but it would be possible to wire-up the Transformation API to do so.

Thanks,
Mike