Integrating Alfresco with external database tables

[sinedie]

Hi,

We're rather newbie in developing with AlFresco, but we're seriously considering now the necessity of implementing AlFresco together with our own database tables so that we can keep track of a series of extra-data we need to present the user with.

We've heard about trigger classes existing in the framework, but are not quite sure on which is the correct approach to integrating our own database tables with AlFresco's. For instance, synchronizing updates in tables from both databases or performing queries on both databases in a single transaction and being able to show our external data to users through Alfresco's GUI. 

Any help will be most welcome. 

Many thanks.

[mrogers]

Don't go there!

Learn about Alfresco's content modeling first.

[sinedie]

Thanks, mrogers.

We very much appreciate that piece of expertise and take good notice.

Still, in case we don't feel type contents or aspects are suited for some of our specific needs and want to include foreign tables in our model, the question remains: is it a feasable approach? Has somebody made it  out there?

Would it be too difficult to understand the access to data or would it mostly boil down to some piece of Hibernate configuration?

What's more -and please excuse our ignorance-: how can AlFresco duly support a relational model based on document's metadata if there's apparently no way to search associations (i.e. relationships)? :?:

In that regard, does anybody know about the BlueXML project for Alfresco and what it's good for?

Many thanks again.