File Transfer Receiver

[aussen2]

I want to give the new File Transfer Receiver a try but cannot find much information about it. Not sure if this question belongs in this forum but my understanding is that this feature grew out of a WQS requirement anyway. I already read through the section "Configuring the File System Transfer Receiver" in the Alfresco documentation for 4.0 but there are still a lot of questions unanswered especially in regard to enable this feature for the WQS project. It would be very helpful if you can address some of these questions or point me to some more detailed documentation.

1. How do I enable this feature for a WQS site and how does it change the publishing process?

2. How does this feature handle templates? Can I somehow specify templates to use for rendering the published files? Or would I have to configure additional renditions to get my content templated before publishing?

3. How does enabling this feature effect the usage of renditions? Do I have change my rendition configuration to create "real" nodes instead of hidden child nodes? Or does it somehow allow to configure a mapping that specifies where to put the hidden child node renditions when publishing?

[bremmington]

The file transfer receiver (FTR) is not related to WQS at all. WQS requires an Alfresco repository on the delivery tier. The FTR is more useful if you are not using WQS, or if you want to push some static content to a web server to supplement a WQS website.

[aussen2]

Thanks for the quick response. It already clarifies a lot. 😉 But wasn't there supposed to be some mechanism for exporting a WQS site to a file system in Alfresco Community 4.0? Is this still something for the future or did I get this completely wrong at all?

[bremmington]

I think that was a misunderstanding. WQS is an example of a coupled (aka "frying") WCM system similar to the likes of Drupal and FatWire. It requires the repository to be in place at delivery time, and caches content and metadata to allow it to scale out well. There are no plans to convert it to run off a file system.

[sam1980]

Wouldn't it make sense to push binary files such as documents and images which are part of a WQS site directly to the file system on the content delivery server?

[bremmington]

You may want to do that yes, which is why I said in my initial reply:

The FTR is more useful if you are not using WQS, or if you want to push some static content to a web server to supplement a WQS website

Although WQS caches all content on the local file system anyway, so binaries are delivered very quickly indeed. It just periodically tests whether the content has been updated in the repository (like a reverse proxy cache would do).