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Alfresco Community Edition 5.2

resplin
Elite Collaborator
Elite Collaborator
‎07-02-2016 05:51 PM

What's new in Alfresco Community Edition 5.2?

This page lists the new features added to Alfresco Community Edition during the 5.2 line of releases. Release bundles are named for the month they were generated, and may contain components from different versions of the product.

Alfresco Platform

New REST APIs

Background:

New and updated endpoints include:

  • /nodes (files, folders, custom nodes, renditions, peer & child associations, permissions  ...)
  • /nodes/{nodeId}/versions/*
  • /nodes/{nodeId}/lock and /nodes/{nodeId}/unlock
  • /deleted-nodes (trashcan)
  • /shared-links (publicly shared links, including renditions)
  • /queries (live search for /queries/nodes, /queries/people and /queries/sites)
  • /search (advanced searches)
  • /sites (create & delete site, update details, list sites filtered by visibility and preset)
  • /tickets (login & logout)
  • /people (list people, create users, update profiles, password reset)
  • /discovery was added to determine server version, license info (for Enterprise) and server status i.e. if audit is enabled, read-only mode etc.
  • /groups provides a group management API for retrieving & managing group membership
  • /downloads allows downloading a set of files as a ZIP

Existing endpoints:

  • please refer to the new REST API explorer (for existing endpoints since Alfresco 4.2 - 5.1)

New REST API Explorer

The REST APIs are browse-able in the REST API Explorer. This is included in the SDK, or can be installed by adding the WAR to your Alfresco install and configuring CORS.

Background:

You can play with a temporary deployment of the new API Explorer here:

Trash Can Cleaner - REPO-1333

The Trashcan Cleaner is a scheduled job that will empty your Alfresco trashcan. Draft documentation is attached to REPO-1526. This feature incorporates the work originally contributed by Bertrand Magnier and Julien Berthoux while at ATOL Conseils & développements, then improved by Rui Fernandes and Philippe Dubois.

Slowdown of Brute Force Attacks - REPO-1489

This release contains a simple mechanism for temporarily locking user accounts when there are multiple consecutive failed attempts at authentication. During the lockout period, all authentication attempts are denied and a warning is printed to the logs. This will significantly slow down attempts to guess passwords and allow administrators to take defensive measures. The number of failed attempts that trigger a lockout and the length of the lockout are configurable.

Remove jBPM tables - REPO-483

jBPM is removed. It is no longer possible to turn it on manually. Customers should migrate to Activiti before upgrading. There is a job to remove all the legacy jBPM tables from the database, which is deactivated by default. To run the job set: system.remove-jbpm-tables-from-db.ignored=false

Support Tools in the Administration Console

With the Support Tools you can monitor your system and diagnose performance, communication, and memory issues. You can also export information and reports for further analysis, or to send to the Alfresco Support Team. For more information see: http://docs.alfresco.com/5.2/concepts/monitoring-intro.html

GhostScript Removal

Due to a license change in GhostScript, we replaced it with PDFium. PDFium is the PDF engine shipped with Chromium. In our tests, PDFium produces equivalent results to GhostScript with less processing or memory usage. PDFium is wrapped with an alfresco-pdf-renderer executable, and the Administration Console has two new properties specifying the location of the alfresco-pdf-renderer executable and working directory, but these properties should not be touched in a normal installation.

Alfresco Developer Framework

Though not distributed as part of the Alfresco Community Edition bundle, we are excited to mention the new Alfresco Developer Framework which is a collection of Angluar 2 components that leverage the new REST APIs in the 5.2 family of releases.

Background:

Alfresco Share

More details, include demonstration videos, are on the page ‌

Flexible Site Dashboards - SHA-1394

Site Managers now have greater control over the features within their sites.

  • Optional Site Dashboards: Site Managers can customize a site and remove the Site Dashboard when it is not required
  • Home page configuration: a Site Manager can pick any Site feature to be the initial page that will be displayed to visitors

Easy Site Deletion - SHA-325

Site Managers can now easily delete a site directly from the site configuration options drop-down menu.

Live Search in the current Site

Users can restrict the Live Search results to display only the results from the site they are in, the selection is carried through to the full search results page. See SHA-1521.

Activities Dashlet uses Group Name - SHA-1593

The Site Activities Dashlet now displays the group name instead of the group ID.

Uploading Folders - SHA-1698

Users can upload folders into My Files, Shared Files and Site Document Libraries by dragging and dropping the folder directly into the desired location on the Share user interface.  Dropping a folder will automatically create the folder, its subfolders and all files within the folder structure, empty folders are also created automatically.

Creating Shortcut Links - SHA-1629

When copying a file to a different location a user can choose to create a Shortcut Link in the destination location instead of creating a copy.  When a user opens a Shortcut Link they are redirected to the original files location, users without permission to access to the original file will not be able to open a Shortcut Link successfully.

Search Term Highlighting - SHA-233

The search term entered by users is highlighted in the Search Results page when it is found in a filename, title & description to help users more easily identify the content they are looking for. The search results page also extracts and displays a snippet of relevant text from a document that contains the search term.

Bulk File Actions on Search Results - SHA-1439

In the Search Results screen users can select multiple results and perform file actions such as copying, moving, deleting, and downloading as a zip file.

Managing Requests to Join Sites - SHA-1621 & SHA-1511

Site Managers will receive a notification when another user requests to join their moderated site, the email links through the Site Members > Pending tab where new UI displays all pending requests to join.

Improved UX of Site Creation - SHA-1612

A new Create Site screen has been implemented, the screen will now inform users when they are creating a site that has the same name as a site that already exists.  The new screen has been created using Aikau.

Login Redirect from a Public Document Share - SHA-1616

When logging in from a Pubilc QuickShare URL users will now be redirected back so that they can access the Document Details for the shared file instead of going to their user dashboard.

Search

Alfresco Search Services + SOLR 6 - SEARCH-3

Alfresco now supports Solr 6 although Solr 4 remains the default. As part of the introduction we are also separating the distribution of Solr from the platform to allow us to update it more regularly in the future. Administrators who want to deploy Solr 6 can download the new Alfresco Search Services artifact and install from there.

Search term highlighting - SEARCH-127

New feature added to the API where by search term entered by users is highlighted in the results returned when it is found in a filename, title & description to help users more easily identify the content they are looking for. 

Multi-select facets - SEARCH-107

The new REST API also now supports multi-select faceting including a multi-select OR option.

Category faceting - SEARCH-222

It is now possible to create facets based on categories with SOLR 6.

Version store index - SEARCH-228/ SEARCH-250

A standard search usually looks at the most recent version of a document. It is now possible to tell Alfresco to index every version of a document by choosing to index the version store. This will enable the option to search all previous versions of documents. When selected, all matching versions will be returned.

Content reporting API features - Stories

Added support for pivot, timezone, range and interval facets to support basic content reporting use cases. The API user experience is also improved:

  • Option added to return the original request with the response
  • For a given facet entry include the filter query
  • Group facet queries that go together

Admin improvements

Improvements to the admin screens to enable complete Solr configuration.

Mimetype grouping

Mobile

This Early Access Alfresco Java Client SDK contains a Java lib project to easily consume Alfresco Public REST APIs. It includes a set of APIs that allows developers to quickly build Alfresco-enabled Java & Android applications:

Alfresco Java Client SDK 

Records Management

The 2.5 release of Records Management includes bug fixes, architectural improvements, and a new testing framework. Specifically:

  • This release concludes the architectural changes started in 2.4 to build the Enterprise RM module on top of the Community Edition core, overlaid with a small number of proprietary features to enable easy administration in large organizations.
  • The team still needs to separate the Enterprise tests from the Community tests so that the tests can be included in the public repository.
  • The source code has been migrated from Subversion to Git, stored in our GitLab repository.

The 2.5b release of Records Management is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 5.2.

RM 2.6.a delivered updates to GS Core Rest APIs, GS API Explorer and RM Benchmark Driver.

  • The ReST API endpoints allow management of the RM site, record categories, record folders, unfiled containers and unfiled record folders. Upload of new records, record declaration and filing of records in the file plan as well retrieving transfer information are also supported.
  • The API Explorer allows you to explore and test the new ReST APIs.
  • The RM Benchmark Driver allows you to create large amounts of test data for evaluating system performance in your environments.

More details are available in the blog post https://community.alfresco.com/community/ecm/blog/2017/06/27/records-management-community-26a?sr=sea...

SDK

Alfresco SDK 3.0 brings a lot of new changes into the way your customizations are built, packaged, run and tested.

  • JAR Packaging
  • AMP packaging as an assembly
  • Improved compatibility - supports 4.2.x - 5.2.x and onwards
  • Easy upgrades - simply change the "alfresco-maven-plugin" version to upgrade the SDK
  • No forced parent pom - also means we have no profiles
  • All run and integration testing logic moved to the Alfresco Maven Plugin
  • Integration Testing directly on running repositories
  • Simplified archetypes
  • Hot Reloading via HotSwapAgent or JRebel 

The majority of the work in SDK 3.0 has gone into moving all the previous profiles into the Alfresco Maven Plugin. The plugin now offers two new goals "alfresco:run" and "alfresco:it" for executing integration tests.

This release has been published on Maven Central.

General

Branding

You will see some new branding as a step in preparing new branding for a future release of our Enterprise products. This affects some artifact naming, log messages, error messages and administration screens.

Documentation

The documentation is currently published at docs.alfresco.com: Alfresco Community Edition. 

 

Localisation

This release includes: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese versions.

Feature Removals

The removal of GhostScript in this release forced us to stop building installers for Win32 (MNT-17909). We have also chose to deprecate the installation bundle for OSX (MNT-17972), which will not be built for future releases. Neither of those operating systems are recommended for use as servers and those installers were used by less than 10% of people who downloaded the product. Yet they took significant resources to maintain and to test.

People who require Win32 in this release are likely to be able to continue using the distribution.zip coupled with a 32 bit installation of Java, but in the future it is likely that Alfresco will have a hard dependency on 64 bit Java.

Users of OSX will likely be able to continue using the distribution.zip for some time, but they are likely to have the most success running Alfresco on Linux in a virtual machine or container. This is the development approach taken by a large percentage of our engineering team.

Release Notes

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