Creation date

[dschmalz]

Hi,

When importing a lot of documents in Alfresco, it may be desirable to read the "creation date" property from the file metadata. A concrete example is the MS Office files that contain this information. The corresponding metadata extracter does the parsing but it seems that the "auditable" aspect is added at a lower layer and does not use the parsed information.

It would be rather simple to modify the AddContentWizard in the Web Client but there are at least two reasons for not doing it:

1) Other access types (WebDAV, CIFS, FTP) would not perform the parsing (or the code has to be duplicated around)
2) The lower layer that adds the "auditable" aspect is probably overwriting any previously set values

In the end, since the "creation date" is protected no further change is possible. It is also possible to define a custom type that re-defines a second creation date but this is probably not good either. One should use the embedded information.

What would be the best approach to implement this, and does it make sense?

David

[sagar]

I have extensively looked at this issue from CIFS angle.

Normally, in any filesystem, when you copy a set of older files to a new folder, the files' older date is retained. But, in cifs filesystem it is overriden with the current date.

You are right, the auditable class overrides the dates. So, I have changed the class to not to overide if the properties are set.

But, in cifs case, the files created dt, modified dt, etc are not captured from the SMB packets. Hence, the method procNTCreateAndX(..) calls the filefolderservice to create a default node with just the node name as the file name.

In my opinion, this is a very important feature.

[sagar]

I fixed a bit of the code and now I'm able to get/set original modified date.

But, still the original created date is empty.

Sagar

[sagar]

Sorry, though completed this part long back..I remembered about this post today. So, what happens in real life (in Explorer) when you copy an older file is that it retains the modified date but updates the created and accessed date to current date. So, the original created date is forgotten intentionally, no idea why.

So, I could fix only the modified date issue and the created & accessed dates, obviously, are current. So, just like in Windows Explorer. And, correct me if I'm wrong, it is the same behavior on almost all the OS.

[marc1911]

Hi there,

It would be great if there's a solution to keep the creation date of my documents that I'm bulk uploading through CIFS. Is there any progress on a solution or workaround.

[bvcrowell]

Has there been any further progress on a solution to retaining the original file date of migrated content?

This is very urgent in my organization. We have over five years of files that are being migrated from another ECM to Alfresco. Everything is in place to "go live" as soon as we can resolve the issue of retaining original file dates and times.

Does anyone have any further suggestions. I have my Developers working feverishly to try to find a workaround that is acceptable to the end user so we can deploy Alfresco enterprise-wide, but this is a real show stopper in a very high profile environment.

Thank you so much for your attention to this matter.

[paulhh]

I think what is needed is an extra property that holds the creation date of the document (in addition to the creation date of the object in Alfresco).  This property can then be filled by either metadata extraction (e.g. from office documents), or as part of a data migration that passes the file system creation date as metadata in addition to the content itself.

Doing either of these should be straight-forward with the current Alfresco capabilities.

Also, if you are seriously going into production, you probably want to pay for support - and if there's a real likelihood of happening, then there's a chance we may give some "pre-sales" help to get you there.

Cheers
Paul.

[tschiller]

I am having a similar problem- http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?p=31542#31542
Before I go and recommend this product to my company, I want to make sure that something like this can be fixed, though! Please advise. Thanks!

[hkusulja]

Hi!

I am new to alfresco, and I have installed alfresco-community 2.1…, open office is also installed on server

we want to migrate from windows shareing to alfresco…

when i create new user in alfresco, and get access through samba(cifs) or web upload.., the created and modefied date are from today..

i have read this and one other topic about that problem ( http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?p=31542#31542  )
and i didn't find solution..

If I move/copy my file from my documents to one windows machine computer which has sharing, dateas and times are original (so that's ok), but when move it to alfresco, they have today's dates…

Did somebody find a solution? it's emergency and very important…
(there are lot of extension types: pdf, doc, xls, jpg, ….)

(and sorry for my bad english)

[rjackson]

See this post:
http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7792&p=38119#p38119

I got this to work