Product & Development

Last week I started a series of blog post on how to extend Nuxeo Drive. Today I’ll write about factories and adapters. Every file or folder on the client file system is represented on the server side using adapters. Those adapters are associated to a particular document through a factory.

We can take the default configuration as an example to better understand this.

A look at the default configuration

Using Drive on the client side, the first entry point is the Nuxeo Drive folder. It contains all the documents you have synchronized. This folder is represented on the server side through the DefaultTopLevelFolderItem adapter, and returned by the DefaultTopLevelFolderItemFactory factory. This configuration is declared in the org.nuxeo.drive.service.FileSystemItemAdapterService#topLevelFolderItemFactory extension point:

As you can see, you can change the folderName parameter to something else. Some might prefer ‘My Drive’ or ‘My Nuxeo Files’ as name for your sync documents. The default implementation …

Like most parts of the Nuxeo Platform, we designed Nuxeo Drive as something extensible. And there are indeed different ways you can customize it to fit your needs. I’ll be writing more posts about how to extend Nuxeo Drive in the coming weeks. Today we’ll take a look at what you can do by simply overriding the different operations used by Nuxeo Drive.

Let’s take a very simple example. When Drive detects a conflict, the file is renamed a certain way. This is done using the NuxeoDrive.GenerateConflictedItemName operation. So what we can do is override this operation to specify our own way of renaming a file. Right now what it does is split the name of the file and the extension. Then we generate the contextSection. It’s the user’s first and last name concatenated with the current date formatted as “yyyy-MM-dd hh-mm”. Then it puts them back together.

To …

Building a wonderful content-centric application with a perfect taxonomy, with damn smart workflows, with incredible automation chains, etc. is great, sure. Still. You still need to paint it, if you see what I mean.

Nuxeo Studio lets you easily define the main branding of your application: login screen, colors used for text, background, links, … It is documented here. That said, you also often need to be more context-specific. For example, you may want to display a text widget in red so the user knows it is an important part of the layout. Or you may also want to force data entry with upper case letters for example.

Let’s take the following example: A workflow…

… has a “name” workflow variable. The form of its “First task” node displays this variable in a text widget…

… and you want it to be displayed in red.

So, you set its …

Here’s a question that comes back often, asked by bruce: How to add tag capability during drag’n’drop?. Since Thierry added HTML5 drag’n’drop to the Nuxeo Platform, it’s possible to fill in metadata right after the import, and apply them to all the imported documents. But I understand it can be frustrating not being able to add tags. And fortunately the drag’n’drop service for content capture is extensible. The full code sample is available on GitHub.

So here’s how it works. When dragging files in a content view for at least 2 seconds, you’ll be prompted with a Select import operation choice. Those select operations are actually actions. It means you can add as any as you want through the action extension point. These actions have a specific behavior.

The ID of the action must, for instance, be the ID of the operation or the operation chain that …

Being big Atlassian fans here at Nuxeo, we recently started using HipChat. It’s an enterprise chat room. One of the cool things about HipChat is its very simple web API. It makes it really easy to send notifications to a chat room.

To show you how dead easy it is, I did a project showing how to send Nuxeo events to a Hipchat room using their web API. I did it using Nuxeo IDE to generate my plugin structure, using the Nuxeo Plugin Project and Nuxeo Listener wizards. My listener only listens to documentCreated and documentModified events. Each time they occur, we send a small message to a HipChat room, containing the URL of the document, its title, date and creator. The code is really simple (especially because most of it is generated by Nuxeo IDE):

What it does is simply relay the modify or create events to a room. …

There’s an interesting question today from milonette, asking how to access labels with MVEL. Sometimes the Content Automation API doesn’t provide everything you need out of the box, hence the question. But the good news is this API is extensible.

While some functions are already available in the automation context, there is currently nothing to access the resource bundles. We’ll need to add our own function into it. This is quite easy to do. First we need to write the new function we need, then we’ll write an operation that adds this function to the content automation context.

Our localized function needs different parameters. We want the locale, the name of the resource bundle, the key of our message and some optional parameters. Here’s a simple implementation:

Now that I have my function, I need to create an operation that will make this available within the automation context:…

Hi everyone, and welcome to this new tech report. It’s a rather short one this week — we’re mostly consolidating what you’ve read about in the previous report. Oh, and we released Nuxeo Drive :D

Nuxeo Drive

Drive 1.0.1 released

Drive 1.0.1 was release last week.

Next steps

There is a known issue when several files are created on the server: because the server may be busy, there is a time shift between the audit log event date and the time where the audit entry is actually persisted. This time shift can lead the client to ‘loose some events’ and then not see some files.

To fix that, we should:

• Review the polling system: based on the audit sequence ID rather than the time window
• Prepare the upgrade of the client side database
• Make the client able to detect when a database update is needed.

Oracle issue

There is a …

As you may already know, we are working on the next version of our Digital Asset Management module. One of the pieces of big news is that it has been designed to be fully customizable by Nuxeo Studio, our online customization tool.

Some work on the Studio side is scheduled to enable some DAM-customizable features; however, a lot can already be done when you know what resources to use in Studio (document facets, form layouts, etc.).

To help with the learning curve, we have released an application template that you can import in your Studio project to test DAM customization.

A Studio application template is composed of projects and samples that you can use as a basis for your own project. To find out more, you can have a look at the Studio documentation on application templates.

What can you do with it?

The application template redeclares …

We just released a beta version of Nuxeo Drive, a desktop synchronization tool for the Nuxeo content repository. We thought that a little story would be the best way of presenting this plugin, that you can yourself install it on your running Nuxeo 5.6 instance that is up to date with all hot fixes (through HF14). (This version is not compatible with a 5.7-SNAPSHOT Nuxeo server).

John Doe works as a sales rep in a pharmaceutical company. He is frequently at customer sites, presenting the product catalog. When he started with the company, they only had one drug on the market. The company has grown, the product line has grown, and the product documentation is frequently updated. Often, he doesn’t have the latest documents when on site. He is tempted to use one of many consumer cloud file sync services, such as Dropbox or Box, but knows that …

Today we meet Sylvain Chambon, head of the Java Integration Division at Open Wide, and contributor of the Kerberos authentication plugin. You have probably heard of Nuxeo partner Open Wide already, as we did a webinar together about the EasySOA research project. I had the opportunity to interview him at the Documation conference where he gave a standing-room only presentation about how he used the Nuxeo Platform to build a project management app. The good news is that he will give this presentation again as a webinar on April 24th.

The audio is available, with the background noise of a very busy Documation trade show.

Listen to Sylvain’s interview (in French)

Hi Sylvain. You’re working for a systems integrator called Open Wide. Are you working in the Enterprise Content Management field specifically?

Actually I’m working in the Java integration unit, across domains. We’re organized by technology. I …