Newbie question about creating Aspects

[richardgunderse]

Hi

I've known Alfresco for about 5 hours so sorry if this is a noob question.

I've written an app that accepts XML containing metadata concerning  documents that are already stored in Alfresco. So, say I have a document called 'Company Policies.doc' already in Alfresco, the XML I receive will contain all kinds of arbitrary metadata that I need to store against that doc.

From reading the docs, I think that I need to convert the XML into something called an 'Aspect', and then tell Alfresco to attach this Aspect to the document concerned.

I would really appreciate some guidance for the following:
    1) Is my 'Aspect' theory correct?
    2) My app is based on Spring/Struts. Will the Alfresco web services suit my purposes, or do I need to use the Javascript API? I would prefer to use web services if possible.

I've checked out the SVN code, so I am going to start going down the WS route (some nice examples in SVN that I am going off), but please let me know if I should be using a different approach.

Thanks

[roman]

I can only give you an answer to your first question.

yes you can realize it with aspects…
or you can declare an own content type with the properties
which belongs to this type…
don't know what is better for you, it depends on how you want to use it…

the other question should answer somebody who knows it  :wink:
but it web services sounds good…

best regards

[richardgunderse]

Thanks roman

I'll have a look at both aspects and content types as you suggested.

Thanks for the advice