How to enahance the existing action?

[bensonfungcms]

Hi,

I am new to Alfresco.  I have played around the Alfresco after installing it into my laptop.  I got a question of the action enahancement.  If I would like to enhance the existing behaviour, e.g. checkin/checkout process.  Can anyone give me guidelines how I can archieve it?  I have gone through the wiki, it just tells how to create a brand new custom action, it doesn't describe how to enhance the existing actions.  If there is such flexibility for enhancement, it must be great.

Please help


Thanks
Benson

[sdavis]

Depending on what you're trying to achieve, there are a few ways.  I'd suggest taking a look at http://ecmarchitect.com/images/articles/alfresco-behavior/behavior-article.pdf to start.  It describes how to bind in behavioral elements as part of the content model itself using http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Policy_Component

[bensonfungcms]

Let me give you an example.  If I would like to enhance the Checkin action or Checkout action by adding the document encryption/decryption logic into the current checkin and checkout action.  How I can acheive this?


Thanks

[sdavis]

Review the methods available on the VersionServicePolicies interface as described in the PDF noted earlier.  This approach would be the best to ensure consistent behavior across all access points into the Repository.

If you want to stick with only extending the Web UI (via an action), have you already seen http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Externalised_Client_Actions?

[bensonfungcms]

Hi Davis,

Actually, I want to extend the behaviour of the document upload action.  Therefore, I need to know which action class corresponds to this action such that I will modify the logic, e.g. add code fragment to do content encryption before alfresco writes the uploaded content to the disk.


Thanks
Benson