URLs!

[sacco]

I'm very curious about the use of URLs in the Alfresco Web Client:
the JSF URLs that we typically see when browsing are completely
meaningless, and, indeed, my test users frequently send me these in vain,
expecting them to guide me to some document or space about which
they have a query.

When I am sent an email inviting me to a space it doesn't simply contain a
link that I can activate and be taken to the space in question, but rather
a list of the names of the spaces through which I must manually navigate
in order to get there (at least it did in v2.0.1 : I haven't bothered to hook
any of my 2.1 instances into a mail relay yet)!


For most documents and spaces, however, when I look at the
'View Details' page, I see:

o  a 'View in WebDAV' link (and 'View in CIFS') with a nice readable URL
that takes me directly to the correct place;

o  a 'Details Page URL' which is less readable (it uses the
Alfreco Node Reference rather than the location in the repository),
but not completely unreadable, and also takes me directly to the
information I need about this node;

o  'Browse Page URL', or else 'View in Browser' URLs (similar to 'Details'), 
which links directlyto the node in question.

Why then, if usable URLs are available (as they clearly are), are they
hidden in a place where many users will not think to track them down,
rather than being used directly to address pages in the Web Client,
and so to help the Web browser function more as the user expects?

Is there anything simple that can be done to mitigate this problem?

[samuel_penn]

Just to add my voice to this, after trying to show a user how to send a link to a discussion forum to people. The problem I ran into here was that not all content even has the 'Page Browse URL' link - discussion forums being one example. Even after managing to find the URL for a location, it is a meaningless string which doesn't say anything about what it is pointing to; it is long and may not be well handled by mail clients such as Outlook (which have a habit of breaking it across lines); and it can't be verbally communicated (at least, not without a lot of pain).

Is there, or are there plans for, a way to display meaningful URLs when browsing Alfresco, so that users can simply mail the link to a page in the way that they expect, or bookmark a location in their browser? Even a simple task like opening a link in a new page doesn't work as expected, and once you do have multiple tabs open, operations don't always apply to the location the user is actually looking at.

Does anyone else consider this an issue? Is there a solution?

Thanks,
Sam.

[simon]

I second this idea!

The current setup is just bad practice but seems typically JSF behavior. The same is also true for the back button, Alfresco breaks the back button in the browser which is confusing for users. I'm afraid this won't be an easy one but it would be a great improvement!

[jk3us]

I have to agree… You can't grab links to anything or bookmark a certain place in the repo or use the back button… One way that this could be fixed is by using the hash part of the URL to describe the location, javascript could get/set that and use it to send you to the right place.  Facebook uses this technique with success.

This thread is over a year old, has there been any more discussion since then?

[mikef]

The issues you describe (back button not working, unfriendly URLs, unable to bookmark pages etc) are limitations with JSF . With the 3.0 release, Alfresco introduced a new client (Share) based on a new web application development framework (Surf). One of the drivers for this was to address some of the limitations imposed by JSF including the issues you describe. Share supports bookmarking, end user readable URLs and the back button.