editing a zip via cifs on alfresco results in changed noderef

[progdevtom]

Hi,
I'm on Alfresco 4.1.8, when we edit a zipfile in alfresco via CIFS(eg: we remove a file from the zip) the noderef of the zip in alfresco is changed. The original noderef is not to be found anymore.

I'm wondering if anybody can confirm this problem, and if it's maybe a configuration issue?

Thanks,
Tom

[steven_okennedy]

Hi,

You're going to be at the mercy of the program that you're using to edit the zip file, unfortunately.  If the program "saves" the edit as a new file, followed by a delete of the old one and a rename, then Alfresco will have a hard time detecting it as the same file (it's not really) so it will give it a new nodeRef.  On the other hand, a program that saved the edited version to a temp location first and then overwrote the file in Alfresco would be seen by Alfresco as just a single write to the existing file and it would be versioned as normal.

To tell for sure what's going on you'd need to get some low level network captures or logs of the CIFS traffic to see what operations are being performed as part of an edit and save.  It might not be of much use to you though as you won't easily be able to change this behaviour.

It might be worth having a look at using WebDAV instead for the same type of capability if that might work for you

Regards

Steven

[progdevtom]

Thanks Steven, That is indeed a very good thought!
I'll try to do the action with some other zip programs. Maybe I can see a difference. Otherwise I'll indeed need to have a look at the logging.. However, I have no idea how to monitor cifs traffic…

Thanks for your thoughts!
Tom

[steven_okennedy]

I had some previous (unpleasant) experiences like this with some of the older versions of MS Word - they used to do 4 separate operations for a simple save and Alfresco sometimes had issues recognising them for what they were in certain cases.  To monitor the traffic you'd need to use something like Wireshark or Fiddler installed on the client PC so you can capture the traffic from the zip program to and from Alfresco - it's not an easy thing to do however, CIFS is not the nicest protocol in the world to manually interpret.

[progdevtom]

again thanks for the suggestion of wireshark and the likes.
For the record: 7zip indeed makes a replacement of the zip, effectively creating a new node and destroying the old one. Normal windows explorer works perfect for manipulating zip files over CIFS.