how to integrate external data

[armino]

Good morning,

we want to migrate from sharepoint 2010 to alferesco and one would like to know how to integrate data from external sources. We use the 'external list' feature in sharepoint right now.

Q: How would i include external data from an rdbms or web service into the share ui? Can someone please outline the steps and the pieces required?

Thanks,
Armin

[afaust]

Hello,

this totally depends on the use case of the integration, i.e. wether any list should be natively displayed, used as constraints or for convenience lookups (e.g. auto-complete without having to copy the data physically). I believe there already exists a community addon out there to include arbitrary RDBMS in Alfresco Share Forms UI (used for linking Alfresco data objects to external objects) - it is called MetaDBConnector. I am currently not aware of any other addons in that direction.
If you need a custom solution / integration, you might end up implementing custom DAOs, services and web scripts to provide your external data - possibly emulating the data list structure to the UI or performing some kind of synchronisation. Web Services could be integrated via custom Web Scripts or services, depending on the depth of integration.

Regards
Axel