What is store

[nihar]

I have browsed many posts to get clarity on what exactly a store is , but i am confused.


Please tell what is STORE?



Thank You,
Nihar Narla

[iblanco]

To be honest that's quite a good question and I think in part is more a philosophical question than technical.

Alfresco is a Content Management platform, and over this content solution many different final solutions can be built. One of the most popular probably being what used to be called Alfresco DM (Document Management).If you see it from this point of view it might somehow make more sense to you why there could be different "stores" that might be used in different situations.

Even in a solution like Alfresco DM multiple stores are used though. The store is a way of separating contents that pertain to different applications or that have different behaviour or purpose. For example in Alfresco DM you have "workspace" store which retains all the contents that represents the files and contents that the user can interact with, you have "archive" that is another store that keeps the content in the trashcan etc… You might argue that the trashcan content could be stored in the same store in a different branch but as I said this is more an organizational or philosophical concern than technical (although I suspect that separating the deleted content "archive" allows some clever simplification of trashcan management).

What is an even more interesting question IMHO is what are the protocols and how they are used in Alfresco ? The "protocols" are the part just in the right of the store whenever you see a NodeRef, por example the "SpaceStore" in "workspace://SpaceStore". I suppose this identifies which services should be related and used to manage each store but I don't know how this is hooked into the logic of alfresco exactly.

[mrogers]

Its quite sinple really.   A repository contains a set of stores. And each store contains nodes, associations and other stuff like acls.    You will find people talk about "the DM store" but I find that unhelpful,  DM does not have a unique type of store,  its a higher (application) level concept.

The "protocol" is really just a name for a type of store. Someone in the early days of alfresco thought to make the store identifier look like a URL and that's the format used forever afterwards.   

There are different types of store,  for example there's the workspace stores which contains the files and folders you work with, the system store that contains "system" nodes, the archive store which contains archived nodes, the MT stores and the avm stores which contain avm nodes.

Alfresco Enterprise has the XAM store and Caching Store as well

There could have also been an "RM store" with the extra RM security although AFAIK that's not the way it was actually implemented.