how to link business model to business objects

[dargaz]

Hi,

We have just started evaluating Alfresco for our Document Management system.

Like other organisations we have already stored our main business objects i.e. Property/Assets in our RDBMS which are being managed by other application. If we are to use Alfresco to store documents aganist each property/asset, then I haven't yet been able to figure out how to link/index the incoming documents for a particular business task against the corresponding business object/asset!!

What we define in the Alfresco hierarchy (I think is equivalent to component model) is our business tasks for example something like 'Gas Safety', 'Repairs' or 'ASB' etc

And what we expect be able to do is on uploading documents under each business task (as above), to index them against the corresponding property which is our main business object.

how do we do that? Any examples on this? tutorial, video, …..

Thanks

[jpotts]

It sounds like you have an external system that maintains reference data that you would like to link to objects that reside in your repository. There are several ways you could do this.

A simple approach would be to extend Alfresco's content model with your own custom type, then add a property to that type which could be used as a reference to your other business objects. Maybe that reference is a URL or maybe it is a unique ID of some sort. In the simplest case, that field is edited manually by someone to establish the link.

To do this, you only need to know how to create your custom content model and then expose it to the user interface. Here is a tutorial on custom content models that includes Explorer UI configuration. This page talks about using the form service to configure the Share UI.

Obviously, this could be improved, but it gets a little more complex. For example, maybe you want a dropdown list to include values you look up from an external system. One way to do that is to use a custom constraint that you add to your content model that uses Java code to perform the lookup. Or, maybe you need a more elaborate UI to let users search your external systems for those references from within the Alfresco user interface. You could write Share customizations to do that.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas and gets you pointed in the right direction. If I am off track from what you are trying to do, please clarify and I'll take another stab at it.

Jeff