Alfresco Form-Model Management

The Form Management Module allows you to design and manage forms that in turn deploy content models within Alfresco. Giving us the complete control over Usability, Design and Validation used in today's user focused forms.

This is accomplished via the "hot deploy" method in the Data Dictionary/Models space. Therefore changes to the model are made available immediately.

Presentation Layer and Content Models.

Introducing a new presentation layer between the content model and the end user allows us to take control of the Usability, Design, Validation and verification used in today's modern forms. By splitting these layers up we can now take advantage of the following:

• UI representation of form data can be completely custom (e.g. Using a slider, calendar, etc...)
• Save time and effort creating forms and models (manage it in one place, manage the form = managing the model)
• Move work over to the business area. Administrative staff can easily manage the forms themselves
• Usability is in your complete control (Drag and drop order of fields, add help tips, create input masks so that data entry requires minimal skill and human error is minimized)
• Use the same form on a different domain, outside Alfresco and manage it all in one place

NEW (2012-05-09): Added "Dummy Fields". A dummy field allows us to add fields to our form that we DO NOT want to put into the model. E.g. I may want cm:name in my form however, I cannot create cm:name again as its already in the Alfresco Model. If this is a "Dummy Field" it will be added to the JSON model and not the XML model BONUS! Dummy fields are colored yellow in the form builder.

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WEBINAR VIDEO TECH TALK LIVE: http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/webcasts/2012/04/tech-talk-live-content-typ...

Updated Release on Google Code: Version 1.2.2
Last Updated: March 11th 2012
Comment: There are some interesting new features in this release check out the release notes for details
Release Notes
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EDIT: So far what have we accomplished?

• Moved Constraints out of the model into a manageable service (Allows more than one aspect to use the same list, allows external lists to be used from other applications AND allows edit and removal of current constraints as this is no longer stored in the content model)
• JSON Representation of a content model allows us to query it and grab information via webscripts without dealing with XML parsing
• Allows for dependent information such as document type -> aspect collection (profiles)
• Allows for much better usability and validation
• Allows for completely new development on data respresentation e.g. (A slider can be used for integer or list values; check out the slider example in the form builder)
• UI for managing forms and form validation
• Both front end and back end node validation based upon given aspects or collections i.e. We can easily check if a node validates against a particular profile or aspect(s) even if it does not have it.
• Allows for quick aspect management i.e. A node can have many aspects or profiles but in your application you may only want to deal with certain aspects at certain points. Using the FM Module you can show one, two or as many aspects are you like and deal with those aspects in an orderly fashion if you want! (Complete freedom over metadata and collections of data
• Share site silos. The dropdown by share site feature allows you to show lists based upon share site. This allows each share site to have its own document types and profiles.

Documentation and Downloads.

Everything is available on google code via the download section or through the Wiki pages.

Development Requirements

• jQuery
• Alfresco REST services
• Freemarker

To get your form up and running on existing applications you only need as little as 3 lines of init code:


$('.some-div-container').form({
'aspects': aspectObject
});

Please NOTE: This module is new, and will be ironing out bugs that pop up (Not a lot of testing as I have no user groups to test with :P )