Version numbers --> letters

[hello_wrold]

Hello there,

one of our customers asked us to set up a small Alfresco site
to collaborate with other architects. There's nothing special about
it, except for one thing: they don't want document versions to be
numbered as you would expect, but to have alphabetical versions.

Instead of a version "2.0" it ought to read "B". As weird as it seems,
but they neither have more than 26 versions nor minor versions.

I'm posting this in "share development" because I'm tempted to look into
building a custom ftl that maps numbers to letters but something else in me
says, I should process this on repo layer if I wanted to do it the Alfresco
way, but I don't know where to start.

Is there even an 'Alfresco Way' to switch to alphabetical numbering? Or did
anyone else do this before?

(Another solution would be to put Alfresco behind a proxy that just regex'es
anyhting that looks like a version number, but I doubt, I would bonus points
in elegance department here.)


Regards,
-daniel

[afaust]

Hello,

I fear it won't be possible to address this properly on the Repository tier. Version numbers are expected to consist of numerical values separated by dots. You could add a custom property of your own to track the Version number and keep the Alfresco internal version. Then you'd Need to customize the standard name metadata renderer in the document list of Share as well as the node Header and version history components in the detail view.

The simplest solution I can see at the moment involves configuring a custom version Label provider that creates version labels consisting of only one number ranging from 1 - 26 (and above if they should start to have more Versions) regardless of the type of version in Alfresco Jargon. And convince the client that a single number is just as good as a single letter.

Regards
Axel