'Hardlinked' nodes - would this be possible?

[gyro_gearless]

Hi friends,

an unholy idea popped up in my head after Coffee #2 this morning:

Would it be possible to have two (or more) nodes of - say - type "cm:content" hardlinked to the same content in Repository, i.e having their cm:content property pointing to the same location in storage? This would be similar to the concept of a hardlink in Unix, where different name entries refer to the same inode. The idea came up when i thought about having a public copy of some document tree without copying each and every file. So technically this should be no problem to create two nodes with that same cm:content property, but i wonder if this would break Alfrescos housekeeping? I.e. what would happen if i delete one of the nodes? Or what would happen if i update one node's content? Anyone evr done this before? I know this is possible with AVM, but i have to stick with the "classic" store for now….  :roll:

Cheers
Gyro

[loftux]

This is what Alfresco does.
If you take a copy of a node to create a new node, the cm:content property still points to the same file in the backend. You can check this with the node browser.
This will be the case until you update content on either of the nodes, the one updated will now point to a new content file. So a copy operation in alfresco is just a db transaction, no content files are actually copied.

[gyro_gearless]

Ouch, it's THAT easy? Thanks a lot, looks like you cured some serious case of thinking way too complicated!  :lol:

Cheers
Gyro