WebForms generated data and referential integrity

[deas0815]

Hallo everybody,

I am evaluating the WCM that comes with the latest labs releases (3b and 3c) and I'm wondering
how to enforce referential integrity regarding content generated by webforms.

An example from the samples would be "AnArticle.xml" (as in article.xsd) referencing a photo
by  URI.

I see nothing stopping me deleting the photo referenced.

As far as I can tell now, alfresco does not yet provide an out of the box solution for the labs releases.

Am I missing something ?

What is the suggested approach for enforcing referential integrity on data generated by forms ?

regards
Andreas

[pmonks]

This is actually a limitation of the XML technologies Alfresco WCM uses for content modeling - more specifically XSD et al have no notion of "referential integrity" between separate XML documents [1].

That said we are well aware of the value of referential integrity (at least for references between the assets that are managed by Alfresco), and there has been quite a bit of internal discussion about how it might be supported without going too far beyond the existing XML specifications.  There's also an enhancement request in JIRA (http://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ENH-294) that's tracking this request - I'd encourage you to vote and/or comment on it.

Cheers,
Peter

[1] Note: I've ignored the XLink and XPointer specifications, since neither have been updated in several years let alone widely adopted.