Copying Web Forms

[aschneider]

The implementation of our web forms is far from ideal but what is the best approach to copying web forms (xsd/xsl) easily? We have about 25 forms which we need to copy from one project to another and it's a real burden doing it the create/download/update method for each xsd/xsl within each of the web forms.

Ideally, I would like to just create a new space under web forms and copy this space (which works successfully) but the web projects do not see these as available templates (it appears to only accept web forms at the top level).

I've tried a number of methods from copying to import/export but none of the methods seem to work properly.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[janv]

Can you please explain what you mean by "We have about 25 forms which we need to copy from one project to another …" ? Do you mean exporting/importing to a different instance of Alfresco (or do you mean associating with a different web project in the same instance of Alfresco) ?

Thanks,
Jan

[tommorris]

If you mean that you're trying to move web-form definitions between alfresco instances, then why not keep all the web-forms in the root of the 'Web Forms' folder, and export the whole of 'Web Forms' as an ACP? You don't have to include the 'Web Forms' space itself, just all it's children.

If you have lot's of other web-form definitions on the source-server that you'd don't want on the target-server, you could either just delete these from the target, or if you have lots of target destinations and you feel this is tedious, you could alter the ACP contents itself (it's a zip file with a descriptive XML file inside), to just include the definitions that you're interested in.

Am I understanding you correctly?
Tom
http://www.ixxus.com

[aschneider]

Thank you for the responses and I apologize for not being very clear.

We are looking to 'copy' web forms on the same Alfresco instance for use for another site we have. The web forms were designed in such a way that the xsl component varies between sites requiring us to replicate the forms over and over again (instead of reusing the existing forms). I've tried a number of different approaches and I believe my ignorance to the product is about 95% to blame.

Could someone patiently detail the steps I would need to take to do this? I understand the basic concepts of copying/pasting and ideally would love to create a new space under web forms for each of our sites (to simplify the act of copy/pasting spaces for each site). The problem here is that 'Web Project' doesn't see forms in the 'subdirectory' space - only the root level. I have no issue using the import/export method but quite frankly, I don't know what to do with the acp file once it gets created.

Thanks

[tommorris]

Perhaps you should share the one-and-the-same web-form between the web-projects. The UI allows you to do this. The problem with this, of course, is that you can't differ the XSL between different web-projects, unless:

  a) You don't use any templates at all, and render the content just-in-time.
 
  b) Your XSL renders the content differently depending upon a value that changes for each web-project. For example, the value of a content field in the XML, or perhaps the value of the sandbox itself (<xsl:value-of select="$alfarent_path"/>).

Tom