Oracle Connector for Alfresco CMS

Tried to install the .oxt file in OpenOffice in Ubuntu 10.04 (Sun Java JRE installed)

Got an errormessage : http://wikke.be/Schermafdruk.png (=screenshot)

Cannot seem to find an answer for this one on the net.
Please advise

In our organisation we will use Alfresco as well as OpenOffice extensively. This is a showstopper for the folks on an Ubuntu Desktop. (Plugin works well on Windows)

Dear All,

I investigated the Openoffice Sun Connector and so far I had a lot of problems.

The one mentioned up in the comment by gronfelt.
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/alfrescoconnector#comment-1549
Question :
- Is there a bug tracker for this connector somewhere ?
- Can you get official Oracle support ?

I fix all the navigation.get.js and xml.flt to get the basic working. (following the instruction in this thread)
I can see my workspaces and navigate. (except when you are in the Users Home but it's a *feature*)

The big problem I have :
Is there an option for checking out the document when you open it from "Open from Alfresco" in the file menu.
What is the procedure ?
Shouldn't it be an icon for both checkin/checkout ?

Any chance the plugin get open sourced ? It would make it a lot more valuable.

OOO Extension website staff :
I would add a note in the description that this plugin is very limited so user don't expect too much and that it has been tested only with Alfresco 3.3.

The connector only works when the alfresco WAR/EAR is deployed using the standard extension path (/alfresco)

Alfresco allows for deployment using a custom extension path and the not so uncommon option to deploy behind a reverse proxy which in most cases changes the application's extension path.

This could easily be fixed by parsing the configured Alfresco URL, the "/alfresco" extension path can be preserved as a sensible default.

For what I can see without decompiling, only the Constants in com.sun.star.cms.alfresco.AlfrescoController should be changed to method calls which build the correct path.

If I can help (I'am a java developer), please let me know because the organization I work for really wants to use this extension.

I installed the connector without error messages, but when I try to connect by clicking Login, nothing happens, the url and the user is correct. The problem occurs both in Fedora 11 as a WinXP client
Server: Ubuntu 8.04.4 STL
Alfresco: 3.2.0 (r2 2440)

Fedora11 Client:
OpenOffice 3.2

Winxp Client:
OpenOffice 3.2

Where can I get the log ooffice?

Thanks

I there.

When I installed this connector I couldn't navigate in alfresco spaces. Search worked fine but navigation didn't.
Alfresco 3.2 - openoffice 3.1.1 or openoffice 3.2 RC5

I've made some changes to the alfresco script "navigation.get.js" in the components directory of the extension.

With these changes now the default workspace is "Company Home" and one can navigate properly.

If you want you may replace the code of "navigation.get.js" with the code bellow to get it worked as described.
My changes to the script are in bold.

Note: if you allready have this file in alfresco server, replace it or do the changes there. Don't forget to restart tomcat.
--------------------------------------------------8

if ((args.n) && (args.n != ""))
{
model.node = search.findNode("workspace://SpacesStore/" + args.n);
model.path = args.p;
}

// Check here in case invalid nodeRef passed-in
if (model.node == null)
{
if ((args.p) && (args.p != ""))
{
var path = args.p;
if (path == "/" + companyhome.name)
{
model.node = companyhome;
}
else
{
var node = companyhome.childByNamePath(path.substring(companyhome.name.length));
if (node != null)
{
model.node = node;
}
else
{
model.node = userhome;
}
}
}
}

// Last chance - default to userhome
if (model.node == null)
{
//model.node = userhome;
model.node = companyhome;
model.path = companyhome.name;
}

-------------------------------8 Best regards,
Paulo Tavares

Hi, I have OpenOffice 3.1 and Alfresco Community 3.2.
I am able to login to alfresco through the connector, but I can't see any document nor space like many other commenters. I have tried tibber's fix but it doesnt work for me.

I read in the comments that this connector has been tested only with Alfresco 3.1 and not 3.2... but I can't find Alfresco 3.1 anywhere in alfresco.com.

Is there any plan to get this extension work with alfresco 3.2?

Thanks in advance,
cobo

Seems like I have everything in place, both on the server (Ubuntu 9.04, Sun Java 1.6, OOo 3.1) and client (Windows XP with OOo 3.1). I've got the webscripts in the right place as well.

WHen I open a new ooWriter doc, I have the Sun Alfresco Connector pane on the right. WHen I click on Sign-In I get a password dialog (as I would expect). When I sign-in, nothing happens.

My URL is correct (https://myalfrescoserver:8443/alfresco/), as is my username. I've tried with non-SSL (http://myalfrescoserver:8080/alfresco/) and have the same problem. I know the webscripts work since going to /alfresco/service/office/myAlfresco brings up a pretty interface.

Any idea what I could be doing wrong?

I tried this plug-in with OOo 3.1 and Alfresco 3.1 Enterprise.
Connection is fine, but I am always connected to 'null' workspace, so I don't see any documents and can't brows the content of the repository.

What can be wrong?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

The same that previous topic.
I didn't found any information to resolve this.

I tried this plug-in with OOo 3.1 and Alfresco 3.1 Enterprise.
Connection is fine, but I am always connected to 'null' workspace, so I don't see any documents and can't brows the content of the repository.

What can be wrong?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sergey

Hello,
thank you very much for the connector.
When accessing a secured Alfresco server, the connector doesn't analyse the X509 'Alt Subject Name' extension of the server certificate when it checks the certificate.
So if the Alfresco server FQDN name is not in the CN of the certificate, the connector will raise a warning for the certificate even if the FQDN name is listed in the 'Alt Subject Name' extension.
Perharps an improvement to take into account for the next version of the connector ?
Best regards.

I've recently installed Alfresco 3.2 and I am trying to use the Sun Connector with Open Office. I am having issues (as I can see someone also posted below) with browsing Spaces. I continue to get errors and do not see any space in the "current Space" field, and when I create a new space, it wants to create that space in ":null"

I see the following errors in the alfresco.log file...

ERROR [org.alfresco.web.ui.common.Utils] Failed to create Person due to error: 08190002 User home space cannot be set to User Homes folder. Please enter a new home space name or select a different parent space.
org.alfresco.error.AlfrescoRuntimeException: 08190002 User home space cannot be set to User Homes folder. Please enter a new home space name or select a different parent space.

Expression path is undefined on line 54, column 56 in org/alfresco/office/navigation.get.xml.ftl.
The problematic instruction:
----------
==> ${path?url} [on line 54, column 54 in org/alfresco/office/navigation.get.xml.ftl]
----------

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

R. Wright

Hi,
I have OOo 3.1.1 installed on CentOS 5 and Windows XP SP3 trying to connect to Alfresco 3.2-9 running under Ubuntu 9.04 using third-party DEB packages.

I can connect to the Alfresco "Sharepoint" server using Office 2007.

Sun Connector is installed in both OOo installs and Alfresco has been modified with the replacement script files. Both, however, give the same problem;

When I click Sign In... I have to enter my Alfresco username and password. Click OK and it just comes straight back with the same screen

The server URL I an using is of the form http://my.server.com:7070/alfresco/

TIA,

Steve

Hi,

I've installed the plugin to OpenOffice.org 3.1 but whenever I press the Sign-in button, nothing happens. the panel just remains the same. The URL to the hosts and passwords are correct as I can browse them with webdav/alfresco explorer.

My client is installed with the following:

Any ideas? Is there an error log I can find somewhere?

Hi,

Thanks for this fairly useful connector.

I am not sure whether this is an Alfresco or Sun Connector problem, but I get an error when attempting to open a spreadsheet or drawing document created with OpenOffice. This also applies to Microsoft Excel documents.

http://host/...../directory/identifier?/document_name'?ticket=TICKET_xxxxxxx does not exist.

Strangely enough there is no problem with Text documents.

Update: If I change the file name extension, in Alfresco, from .ods to .odt the document opens correctly as a spreadsheet.

Thanks for any assistance.

UPDATE: FIXED - Re installed and replaced scripts as per the setup document.

Hello everybody!

I am trying to evaluate this plugin but cannot even get it to install. I am running Fedora core 10 and Sun Java 1.5.0_17-b04. I initially tried installing it with the stock fedora openoffice (version 2.4 something or other) but now have installed the latest 3.1 release from the openoffice website (build 9399-9399).

I have tried double clicking the ".oxt" file, installing it from the extension manager from within ooo and using the command line "unopkg" utility.

I have tried installing it as a normal user and as root.

When trying from the command line I get the following output (after accepting the license);

[Enter "yes" or "no"]:yes
Enabling: Sun Connector for Alfresco CMS
Enabling: Alfresco.xcs
Enabling: sun-connector-alfresco_IDL_types.jar
Enabling: help
....Lucene: Indexing to directory '/root/.openoffice.org/3/user/uno_packages/cache/uno_packages/nQFR48_/sun-connector-alfresco.oxt/help/sk/help.idxl'...
Indexing, adding files
....
Optimizing ...
201 total milliseconds
....Lucene: Indexing to directory '/root/.openoffice.org/3/user/uno_packages/cache/uno_packages/nQFR48_/sun-connector-alfresco.oxt/help/ta-IN/help.idxl'...
Indexing, adding files

skipped loads of "optimizing" messages

.....

Optimizing ...
16 total milliseconds
....Lucene: Indexing to directory '/root/.openoffice.org/3/user/uno_packages/cache/uno_packages/nQFR48_/sun-connector-alfresco.oxt/help/vi/help.idxl'...
Indexing, adding files
....
Optimizing ...
12 total milliseconds
Enabling: types.rdb
Enabling: sun-alfresco-connector.jar

ERROR: unknown error!
Exception details:
(com.sun.star.uno.RuntimeException) { { Message = "unknown error!", Context = (com.sun.star.uno.XInterface) @0 } }

unopkg failed.

Can anybody help me resolve this issue?

Thanks in advance,

Dan.

I've gotten it to work with Alfresco 3.2 now thanks to tibbers solution below. So far I've only tried it out for a short while, it seems pretty good, but there are a few quirks that make it somewhat cumbersome to use.

* A user is constrained within User Homes. A understand the thinking behind this, but if you're mainly using Share you'd rather wan't the users to navigate to their Sites. In the side pane, the restriction seems to be that the user may navigate one level up from his or hers home folder, which means that it could be solved by setting any Site as the users home folder. However, the "User Home"-directory seems to be hardcoded into the save and open dialogues, meaning that the plugin will try to open (server)/User Homes/(site name), which obviously isn't there.

* A check-out ought to open the document directly, it seems like unnecessary work to first check out, then open and there's also a risk of confusion since the user might accidentally open the original version instead of the working copy created in the process.

* If a new document is created with Save to Alfresco... I would prefer if it was automatically checked out.

* Open from Alfresco... should be available from the OpenOffice startup dialogue, now a user must first create an empty document. But perhaps this is a constraint in OpenOffice.org?

* If a document is checked out and then checked in without any changes made a new version is created. It would be neater if a new version is only created when changes are made. But perhaps this i something that has more to do with Alfresco?

All in all this seems to be a really good start and I think that this extension has the potential of becoming really useful. It's a shame it's not open sourced, since I believe that would speed up progress, but I also understand that there might be perfectly good reasons to keep it closed source.

We uploaded a document template, and its description contains a placeholder in its subject, which is extracted as the description property by alfresco.
This attribute causes the plugin not load the folder in which the document is, and every search result which would return the very document is displayed as emty. We found that the document description is returned unescaped in the flt.

We made the following changes to fix this:

--- navigation.get.xml.ftl.bak 2009-07-24 17:35:02.000000000 +0200
+++ navigation.get.xml.ftl 2009-07-24 17:36:34.000000000 +0200
@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@
${thisSpace.displayPath}/${thisSpace.name}/^M
${thisSpace.name}^M
${thisSpace.id}^M
-${thisSpace.properties.description}#if>^M
+${thisSpace.properties.description?xml}#if>^M
^M
^M
${url.serviceContext}/office/navigation.xml?p=${path?url}&n=${thisSpace.parent.id}^M
@@ -76,7 +76,7 @@
${url.serviceContext}/office/navigation.xml?p=${path?url}&n=${child.id}^M
^M
^M
- ${child.properties.description}^M
+ ${child.properties.description?xml}^M
#if>^M
^M
#if>^M
@@ -105,7 +105,7 @@
#if>^M
^M
0)>^M
- ${child.properties.description}^M
+ ${child.properties.description?xml}^M
#if>^M
^M
None.^M

and

--- searchResults.get.xml.ftl.bak 2009-07-24 17:40:45.000000000 +0200
+++ searchResults.get.xml.ftl 2009-07-24 17:41:07.000000000 +0200
@@ -80,7 +80,7 @@
^M
^M
0)>^M
-

I'm trying out the connector with Alfresco 3.2 and OpenOffice.org 3.1 and the browsing of documents and spaces (the tab in the middle) doesn't work as expected. The list of spaces and documents are just empty and when I try to move up one level Alfresco throws an exception:

16:39:39,875 ERROR [freemarker.runtime]

Expression path is undefined on line 53, column 56 in org/alfresco/office/navigation.get.xml.ftl.
The problematic instruction:
----------
==> ${path?url} [on line 53, column 54 in org/alfresco/office/navigation.get.xml.ftl]
----------

I've tested it earlier on Alfresco 3.1 and it worked then, so there seems to be some change between the Alfresco versions.

Hi,

I downloaded this extension and tested some stuff. Until now everthing is working as expected ;)

But now a "feature request":
is it possible, to implement a function, that someone can set a document versionable from within the alfresco connector menu?
If so, the next question would be:
Is it possible to implement the versioning features into the alfresco connector?
(really nice would be a compare function between 2 versions of one document)

Thanks in advance
Martin

I use the French localization of OpenOffice 3.1 if that changes anything... The error message is :

Can not activate factory because java.io.FileNotFoundException: /usr/lib/openoffice/program/ ../basis-link/program/classes/LuceneHelpWrapper.jar

Nice to see that so many people have already download this extension. As i mentioned in my earlier comments we are interested in usable and constructive feedback to improve this extension and the related extension infra structure. Please let us know (private emails are fine') what's good, what's bad ...

Juergen

hi
I'm searching since a few weeks for a plugin like this, and was very happy to found this, but it does not really work:
Additionally to the known issues OpenOffice marks the files as "not writeable" after saving / check in.
So I have to open alfresco every time after editing a file in OpenOffice, and set it writable.

And the known issue listed in the readme-file
"- The checked-out document is not listed when switching to another
tab page (repaint problem)"
is a killer-issue, because this works only ~1 time in more than ~30 tests, so the user have to search the correct file manually.

My system:
OpenSuse 11.1
KDE 4.2
OpenOffice 3.1.0.4
java version "1.6.0_0", IcedTea6 1.4 (suse-24.5.2-i386) Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_0-b14), OpenJDK Client VM (build 14.0-b08, mixed mode)

bye
Olaf

EDIT:
Tested again with
# Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_13-b03)
# Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 11.3-b02, mixed mode)
==> the same issue.
It seems like it is not possible to open+edit+save the documents without opening the "My alfresco" screen with the list of checked-out documents. But there is the known issue I described before, the documents are not listed there the most times.
And OpenOffice hangs for minutes many times I try to use the alfresco-plugin.