Hi,
basically Workdesk is creating a corresponding JOIN if the search definition contains any aspect properties in WHERE or SELECT clause.
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I am struggling with how to make sure that aspect is applied with workdesk
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By default you cannot see that, Aspects are not part of the CMIS 1.0 spec and therefore are used/handled through specific extensions. In CMIS 1.1 there will be a possibility to handle/see Aspects "nativly".
I know that with the older version of Workdesk and alfresco 4.x there was a problem in communication, please try the latest release of Workdesk 4.1.1 where many problems were solved using the Apache Chemistry OpenCMIS framework.
Regards,
D.evil