grants.gov applications as virtual documents

[kgeis]

I saw this on the Alfresco roadmap.

There is a lot of interest in publishing and virtual document tools. We welcome people with publish experience to work with the powerful tools that are already integrated. The JSR-170 model of children nodes works well for creating virtual documents. The Freemarker templating language is powerful enough to manage assembling. Freemarker and PDFBox can handle a lot of the transformation and XML handling. Xforms can handle some of the data capture.

This fits in to how I was envisioning collaborative editing of U.S. federal grant applications from Grants.gov.

Are there any examples which suggest how to model this content?  Is a virtual document a Space or is it Content with children?

I'm sure I'll have more questions if I pursue this.  It may even generate some interesting requirements of Alfresco.

[paulhh]

Hi

Like a lot of things with Alfresco, there may be ways to do things you want now, with existing bits of functionality, or there may be a bit of additional work to do to get something more specific.

You could treat folders as containers for components of a "virtual" document, and use Presentation Templates or scripts to generate out the composite document.  But, if the virtual document structure needs to be more tightly defined, you can define a new type based on Content that has associations to its composite pieces.  Whether they are child-associations (like folder children) or plain ones depends on how you want certain behaviours to work - for example, delete something with child-associations and the children get deleted too.

If you define your own types or aspects, then it's quite simple to add specific actions for them in the UI (perhaps just executing Alfresco JavaScript code against them).

Cheers
Paul.