templates and invitations

[mojo-jojo]

Where can I find documentation on creating space templates?

Also, is there a way that I can automate the invitation of users to spaces?  I want to invite 20-30 users to different spaces with different roles. Doing this throught the web ui would take forever and would also be more prone to errors.

Thanks in advance.

[gavinc]

Hi,

There isn't anything special about creating space templates all you need to do is navigate to Company Home -> Data Dictionary -> Space Templates in the web client and then create the template structure etc. you want.

When you then use the advanced space wizard create from template option your template should appear in the list.

As for automating sending email to users, your best bet is to extend the InviteSpaceUsersWizard bean to send the emails you want. Depending on how flexible you need this to be you may also need to customize projects\web-client\source\web\jsp\wizard\invite-users\notify.jsp.

Hope this helps.

[mojo-jojo]

Thanks. Creating a space template was easy.  

I don't want to automatically send emails to invited users. Instead I need a way to create kind of a roles/permission template.  Let me explain..

I have created a space template which will be used for just about every project that our team is working on.  The permissions/roles applied to folders/subfolders for each of these will also need to be set up the same accross the board.

Is there a way either through a template or API that I can automate the delegation of roles to users?

I hope this makes more sense. Thanks.

[gavinc]

No, there isn't anything out of the box that would allow you to assign the permissions.

Templates are read-only so you couldn't do anything with a template so your only choice is to use the API. You could use the PermissionService to assign the permissions you require across the spaces.

[mojo-jojo]

Okay.

Are there any examples of doing this available?  I have no java experience so where is a good place to start learning?

How is someone supposed to control the roles/permissions when you have a large amount of spaces and users?  I suppose it's a little easier in the Enterprise edition since you can create groups of users.  But you would still have to manually invite groups to each space through the UI.

I only ask because I'm sure there are plenty of IT folks out there that want to deploy Alfresco but don't know Java.

Is it possible to use any other languages to access the API?

[gavinc]

We are planning on allowing permissions to be copied with spaces in 1.3 so you should be able to create a space or a space hierarchy and copy it and then just change the permissions that are different, this will also of course apply to templates.

As for other languages, we have a web services API with examples using Java, PHP, Ruby and .NET. There is a service for assigning permissions so this is another alternative.

[mojo-jojo]

That's very good news.

I went to the page that's is supposed to have examples of using PHP but it is blank. http://www.alfresco.org/mediawiki/index.php/Web_Service_Samples_for_PHP

I haven't been able to find examples of using .NET or Ruby either.


Thanks for your help Gavin.

[rwetherall]

Hi,

The PHP, Ruby and .NET web service examples are included in the source.  This can be downloaded from SourceForge (probably best to wait for 1.2 which should be out very soon) or you can get the latest source direct from SVN (details of how to do this are on the Wiki).

Cheers,
Roy

[alexandra]

If I want to get a direct clickable weblink to the space I have invited users to…how do I do that?

It is of limited use to just notify them that they have access to the space if they will have to spend 10 minutes of finding it…

[kevinr]

Just add the weblink to the email template (an admin user can edit the files in "/Company Home/Data Dictionary/Email Templates"), an example of how to build the links to a space/document can be found in the RSS template in the RSS Templates folder.

Thanks,

Kevin