controlled document access via URL

[steverar]

This may be a web content mgmnt question but …

We have controlled documents that we only want to be accessed by specific websites.  For instance, a.doc should only be accessed by a physician website and b.doc should only be accessed by a hospital website.

Is there a way of having Alfresco see the the request and only serve the document if the URL, or some part, or user, matches with a user, group, etc. ?

I'm sure this could be done programatically but if I can get away with doing it by config/setup so much the better.

Thanks …

[zaizi]

You can create users / groups in Alfresco to correspond to the different websites you have. When try and download a document they'll have to send the username / password in the header request. This assumes the request is coming from server side in these applications. This will not work if users on these different websites click through to Alfresco to download the documents.

[steverar]

Ok, so can be done programmatically .

I'd use this http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/RESTful_API_Reference#Content_Retrieval or this http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Alfresco_Content_Management_Web_Services ?

[zaizi]

It depends what exactly you want to do and if you have java skills in house. You can just utilise http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/URL_Addressability#DownloadContentServlet by adding a custom AOP Advice in Spring around it to do your custom authentication.