Custom Metadata problem

[jmdavid]

Hi,

I created 2 custom metadata for Categories named "My Date" and "My Value".
Now, when I try to edit a category, I get the following error: "Failed to update metadata".
When I want to create add a category, I get: "org.alfresco.service.namespace.NamespaceException: Namespace prefix rmc_My is not mapped to a namespace URI".

I tried to delete my custom metadata, but there is no Delete button!

Please help, thanks.

[neilm]

Whitespace & underscores are not legal characters for custom property or custom association names and should not be allowed in the UI.

A bug has already been entered in our JIRA which may be related to the issues you're experiencing. https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETHREEOH-3564 Watch that bug for a future fix and feel free to add any information which you feel would add value. I will edit the bug now to ensure that all such illegal characters are prevented in a future release.

Unfortunately, if you do create an unusable custom property, you will be unable to delete it due to the restriction described below. This may not be an urgent problem for non-mandatory properties, as you could just ignore the property after that point. Clearly the situation is more serious for any such property which has been flagged as mandatory.

Some background on the inability to delete custom properties that have been created: if you look at http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Dynamic_Models under "Updating and re-loading custom model", you'll see that only incremental updates are supported for an active model in Alfresco. One consequence of this is that deletions from the model(s) are not supported. This restriction is applied at the level of the Alfresco Repository and that is why the deletion won't work even when you edit the model xml. It is when the updated model xml is committed, that the Repo examines it, discovers the deletion and throws the NamespaceException.
Obviously there is currently no UI support for custom property (or association) deletion.

[neilm]

There is a workaround to this issue which I hope might be useful to some of you.

The issue here is that you cannot commit "non-incremental" changes to any active model in Alfresco. Non-incremental means deletions and some updates. But you can make non-incremental changes to inactive models.
What you need to do is to make the recordsCustomModel.xml inactive, delete the custom property that is causing trouble and then make the custom model active again.

So here's how you do it. To do any of this, I'm assuming that you're currently the only user of the system and that there are no records using any of these properties. So this will perhaps only apply to people who are trying out Alfresco DOD5015 in a limited test environment.
You'll need to use the Alfresco web (JSF) client rather than the Share client. Log in as admin, navigate to Company Home/Data Dictionary/Records Management and you should see a file called recordsCustomModel.xml. Edit the properties of this node and uncheck the active box. Then edit it inline. You'll need to scroll the xml content to near the bottom to find the custom properties. Identify your problem property and delete its xml. Apply your changes to this file. Then change the active property back to 'checked' and if you refresh your RM web UI your model should be ok again.
Now recreate the property but do not use spaces or underscores in its name.