When you upload Outlook emails (.msg-files) to Alfresco, the filename would default to {email-subject}.msg, which can be quite problematic if you want to save multiple emails with the same subject in the same folder in Alfresco.
To resolve that issue, the Alfred Desktop backend installs an Alfresco policy that will extract the sent-date from the Outlook email and renames the email in Alfresco to ‘{subject} - {cm:sentdate}.msg’ when a new email is uploaded.
To disable this policy, you set add eu.xenit.policy.emailnaming=false in the alfresco-global.properties file.
The default value is true.
Autocomplete can be enabled by defining the allowed groups in alfresco-global.properties. When editing an untokenized property, an autocomplete suggestion menu will popup while typing. The tokenization of the property has to be set to false or both. In order to do this your property in the metadata model has to look similar to this:
<property name="fred:example_autocomplete_property">
<title>Autocomplete Property</title>
<type>d:text</type>
<index enabled="true">
<atomic>true</atomic>
<stored>false</stored>
<tokenised>both</tokenised>
</index>
</property>
As you can see in the snippet, tokenised is set to both.
Autocomplete skips the permission checks, suggestions might come from more secure nodes. Therefore it is important to take access control into consideration. You will have to add a configuration similar to the following example to alfresco-global.properties on the server.
Example configuration:
Group-names
Tip: You can create an “autocomplete” group on Alfresco and add that group to the configurated autocomplete authorities. You can then add users/groups to the autocomplete group via the admin tools of Alfresco Share. The advantage of this is that you don’t need to restart Alfresco because you don’t have to edit alfresco-global.properties if you want to allow autocomplete for certain people.
By default Alfred Desktop is quite liberal in what a user does with the metadata in Alfresco. Alfred Desktop asks the user to enter/edit the metadata when he uploads a new document, but doesn’t really enforce this.
Organizations that would like to enforce a more strict company-policy on metadata can enable the incomplete-metadata-policy. This policy will apply the xmd:incompleteaspect to documents that don’t have all mandatory metadata properties set or to a document where the type is one of the eu.xenit.incomplete.invalidTypes types. This allows Alfred Desktop/Alfresco to keep track of which user introduced a document into the repository and who is responsible to provide the metadata for a specific document
You can enable this functionality on a folder (-substructure) by applying the (configurable) validation-aspect on said folders. Alfred Desktop comes with a dictionary model that contains the aspect xmd:validate to do just that, but you can use any other aspect you’d like to use, including from your own dictionary model.
In practice, this means if a user uploads a document in a folder-structure that has the metadata-validation-marker set, the user is ‘required’ to select a specific node-type and has to provide all mandatory metadata on this document. The document is marked in Alfresco as metadata-incomplete and the user that uploaded the document is the metadata-owner.
Using the property deepMarkerSearch you can configure this policy to look only at its direct parent or walk up the folder hierarchy to see if any of the parent folders has the validation-marker set.
This functionality used to be part of the Alfred Desktop backend .amp up until version 3.4. It is now separated out in a module you have to install next to the Alfred Desktop module. If your Fred backend version is below 3.5 you will first have to install the Incomplete Metadata Tagger module in order to use this policy.
To configure the incomplete metadata policy add the following lines in the alfresco-global.properties
aspect-qname
aspect-qname
type-qnames
property-qnamesSet the enabled property to true to enable the incomplete metadata policy. In the markerAspects you can insert a list of QNames that are marker aspects. Folders that have this marker aspect will be scanned for incomplete metadata. This includes subfolders of the folder that has the marker aspect. To prevent a subfolder to be scanned, you can mark it with an exclude aspect. The invalidTypes property is a comma-separated list of node-types that are too abstract and should be flagged as incomplete. To check the entire parent hierarchy for a marker aspect, set the deepMarkerSearch to true. Mandatory properties that need to be ignored can be added to the propertiesToIngnore list.
Note: QNames can be short or fully qualified.
The Alfred Desktop client behavior can be configured through the extended object in config.js. All these values are optional. With the default client-configuration, the mandatory-metadata tracking makes the Alfred Desktop client keep track of the documents with missing metadata and are shown in the bottom panel.
| Parameter Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| incomplete.tracker.interval | number (int) | Defines the interval (in minutes) that Alfred Desktop polls Alfresco for metadata updates on incomplete-metadata objects. The default value is 2 (minutes). If the users use Alfred Desktop as the primary interface to Alfresco, you can set a higher value. If the users use other interfaces (Share, WebDAV, …) together with Alfred Desktop, you might want to keep this value low. |
| incomplete.ui.enable-missing-tab | boolean | This enables a menu item under Window, labeled ‘Missing Metadata’. This menu item opens a new tab, which lists the documents of the user with missing metadata. |
The user is still free to ignore this bottom panel. For most deployments, this is sufficient.
However, there is another option available to force the user to provide metadata: there can be limits applied to how many documents with missing-metadata can be in his/her queue, before Fred refuses to upload more documents.
| Parameter Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| incomplete.limit.soft | number (int) | Soft limit on the number of objects in the user’s incomplete-metadata queue, before Alfred Desktop refuses to upload more content. The default (unset) value is unlimited. |
| incomplete.limit.hard | number (int) | Hard limit on the number of objects in the user’s incomplete-metadata queue, before Alfred Desktop refuses to upload more content. The default (unset) value is unlimited. |
| incomplete.limit.global | boolean | Supported values:False (default) or True. Defines if limits are applied globally or only in folder-contexts that have mandatory-metadata applied. |
A new feature introduced in Alfred Desktop 3.6 is exporting and locking a folder and after that importing and releasing that same folder. When exporting, the folder is exported as a zip. You can extract it and make changes to the files inside that folder. By using a hashing policy, Alfred Desktop can keep track of the changes that were made to each file and detect if files are added or deleted.
The hashing policy will calculate the hash every time a file is uploaded or the content is edited. Then the hash value is added to the property of a hashing aspect.
The configuration for this policy is located in alfresco-global.properties. There you add the following line: eu.xenit.hash.supported-algorithm=sha-1
At this point only SHA-1 is supported but in the future some other algorithms can be supported as well.