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Alfresco Web Script Portlet rivet

AWPr

AWPr is a JSR-168 portlet that can be used to expose remote Alfresco Web scripts, including those that need user authentication. With the help of a custom Alfresco authentication component that we wrote the portlet can carry the user credentials from the portal to Alfresco, authenticate the user in Alfresco and retrieve a ticket that can be used during all subsequent interactions between the end-user, the portlet and ultimately the Alfresco Web script itself.

Motivation for AWPr

When integrating Alfresco Web scripts with JBoss Portal or Liferay Portal AWPr alleviates the need for having to deploy all of Alfresco inside the portal as is the case when using Alfresco's OOTB (out-of-the-box) Web script portlet for Alfresco/Portal integration.

AWPr is also highly configurable. Through the use of portlet preferences you can create multiple instances of AWPr and configure each one with a different Web script URL and a set of parameters with default values if needed. The instance will then RESTfully fetch the result of the Web script's render phase and carry that over to the portlet finally rendering it on the screen within the confines of the portlet window.

It is hence possible to run two instances of AWPr on a single portal page where each instance is exposing a different Web script even if those Web scripts are hosted on two different Alfresco servers regardless of their geographic location.

AWPr lives here:
http://wiki.rivetlogic.org/display/AWPr/

Feel free to ask questions about AWPr in this thread.

–Alaaeldin

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Hi

I found AWPr is a very useful portlet. However while using this with the sample myspaces webscripts which interacts with alfresco I found that only the UI is rendered but but no content is displayed as shown in one of the screen shots.

After investigation I've found that there is a Javascript error in the connection-min.js files which halts the execution of the controller script. The error says

Access to restricted URI denied" code: "1012 while executing "o.conn.open(method,uri,true)" statement from connection-min.js files.

Please help me to resolve this error.

Regards
Neeraj

Hi,

The reason this is happening is due to cross-domain security. You can resolve this issue using a proxy like mod_jk for example. The following wiki page explains what the proxy setup should do:

http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/AWPr/Example+Web+scripts

The basic idea is that Alfresco must be accessible using the same domain name as that of the portal.

Hope this helps,

–Alaaeldin

Your portlet seems really interesting, but I would like to ask you a question.
If a portlet developed with "Rivet Web Script portlet" shows a link to a non public document inside Alfresco, can the user access it?
For example: MySpaces portlet can show the link below:
http://portal-hostname.com/alfresco/d/d/workspace/SpacesStore/1dacbd04-d028-482f-9359-a7e195f06442/filename.ppt
If the user clicks on it, the access to the document will not be a "liferay access", but a direct access to Alfresco, so the user wouldn't be authenticated. Would he?
How did you solve this problem? Should one use a standard SSO like CAS?

Thank you,
Marco

Hi,

What's happening is that the MySpaces webscript adds a cookie with the Alfresco ticket in it to the client browser when the webscript is first rendered. Subsequent calls to the Alfresco download servlet will then be authenticated as the Liferay user.

The portlet will call the Alfresco login webscript initially to get an Alfresco ticket for the Liferay user. As a side note, this ticket is sent on every request from the AWPr portlet instance to Alfresco via a URL argument called 't'. This is to allow webscript authors to do whatever they want with that ticket.

If you copied the Alfresco download URL and pasted it into a browser that doesn't have the Alfresco cookie you will be redirected to the Alfresco login page. But if you add the parameter 'ticket=TICKET_<ticket-value>' you will be able to download the document if the user who owns the ticket has read rights on it.

The drawback here is that you wouldn't be able to robustly have more than one portlet on the same portal page displaying webscripts that serve download URLs from different unclustered Alfresco servers because the cookie would keep getting overwritten. The only way would be to append the ticket to the download URL like so:

/alfresco/d/d/workspace/SpacesStore/771fbc61-d11a-4685-8a4d-143c310d07f0/image.png?ticket=TICKET_fb8dfe0f9fdf48b62e428fbe8f6665ddab01db55
‍‍‍

This is ok but not desirable since accessing this URL from any browser will authenticate the request as that user which could pose a security risk.

–Alaaeldin

Hi,
I found AWPr is an useful portlet to expose remote Alfresco Web scripts and fortunately I got it working. I also managed to expose entire alfresco under portal…but I didn't succeeded so I toke a chance with AWPr portlet.
Now, my problem is that I have already my webscripts, say webscript A and in A's ftl template I have a link to another webscript of mine, say B webscript…but I dind't find a way to open B on the screen within the confines of the portlet window. In the best case…it leave liferay portal and opens as simple alfresco webscritp (say url http://localhost:8080/wcservice/B.
Can anyone help me to solve this issue?
Greetings,
Rosa

Hi,

AWPr provides a javascript function that can be used to convert Alfresco URLs to Liferay URLs in the client's browser. This function is used by awprmyspaces.js which is packaged with the example webscripts AMP.

The method is called AWPr.encodeUrl(). Of course this means that you won't be able to have more than one AWPr instance on the same portal page. The next AWPr release takes care of this issue by adding a portlet preference that allows you to configure the name of the javascript variable that holds the encodeUrl function thus allowing for multiple AWPr instances on the same portal page to have different javascript encodeUrl functions. The way it will work is as follows:

If the preference value is 'ABC', then the javascript variable will be called 'AWPr_ABC' and the function will be called like this:

AWPr_ABC.encodeUrl()

To see an example of how to use this function you can see this link: http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/AWPr/AWPr+Design#AWPrDesign-AJAXcalls

Another feature we will add is another portlet preference that allows you to configure what strings need to be replaced and what they should be replaced by. We could also have another portlet preference that allows you to configure other script URLs that need to be proxied. That way you could run webscripts that navigate back and forth between one another.

Hope this helps,

–Alaaeldin

Hi Rivet,
thanks for your support… Now I'm facing with AJAX (JSON) calls made by myself…It's my first time with them so I'm getting what I want, but I can't say if it's correct.
I read about AWPr encodeUrl function, it seems interesting and I wrote a simple test but I didn't get what I need:


<script type="text/javascript">
<!–
 function func() {
&nbsp;&nbsp; var link = document.getElementById("my");
&nbsp;&nbsp; link.setHTML('<a href="' + AWPr.encodeUrl("/alfresco/wcservice/quality/quality2") + '">Click Here</a>');

}
// –>
</script>
 <body onload="func();">
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<div class="content">
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<div id="articles">
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<div id="right">
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <p id="my">temp</p>
….(other stuff)
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

and what I get in href is "http://localhost:8081/web/guest/home?p_p_id=awpr_WAR_awpr_INSTANCE_Hm1D&p_p_lifecycle=1&p_p_state=normal&p_p_mode=view&p_p_col_id=column-1&p_p_col_count=1" where I suppose istance is the same as first portlet load that is linked to webservce (/alfresco/wcservice/quality/quality1) (say A, as in my firts post), so I get a second call to same webscript and not to B (/alfresco/wcservice/quality/quality2). Surely I'm in wrong somewhere… Let me know what you think, also about making AJAX calls from zero. Sorry If I can't explain better

, they all are new concepts to me.
Thanks again!

Hi,

The current release of AWPr assumes that you are using a single webscript where all navigation happens within that webscript itself. The other supported scenario is for an outer webscript calling an inner webscript using an AJAX call much like what you see with MySpaces and MySpacesPanel.

We will try to support your use case by adding a portlet preference that accepts a list of script URLs that are to be proxied but I'm not sure when we will be able to release it. I'll update this forum when I have a date. I'll also try to include it in the upcoming 1.1.0 release.

How urgent is your need for this feature?

Thanks,

–Alaaeldin

Hi again,
you are very kind…but I need it working in a few days, so don't considerate my needs in your release planning.

Still, I don't understand when you say:

The other supported scenario is for an outer webscript calling an inner webscript using an AJAX call much like what you see with MySpaces and MySpacesPanel.

Could you explain this?

Smiley Surprised

ops:
I can't understand if it fits my use case…May be I'm misurdestanding, otherwise I'll continue working at my "silly" solution.

The MySpaces webscript that comes with Alfresco uses a YUI asynchronous call to get the contents of an inner webscript called MySpacesPanel and changes the URLs to using the URL encoder function. You could potentially do the same thing in your webscript where the "Click Here" link will make an AJAX call and get the other webscript (quality2) and use the encodeUrl function to change the URLs in that webscript.

I'm not sure if that will work in your case though so it would probably be best to use the next release of AWPr for this.

–Alaaeldin

It's what I do…I have differents links making AJAX call, but I don't know if and why I should need to encode URLs in second webscript… :roll:

Sincerely thanks for help again, now I can't wait…in future I'll look for next release

Hello,

First I want to thank you for you awesome job with AWPr. It is very nice. Now about my situation, I'm experiencing some problems calling AWPRmyspaces webscript. I have mod_jk mounted and also I already configured the portlet in liferay so my enviroment taking account that apache is receiving all request is:

Apache: http://localhost
Alfreso: http://localhost/alfresco [http://localhost:8080/alfresco]
Liferay: http://localhost/* [http://localhost:8090/liferay]

I configured AWPrmyspaces webscript with the following:

alfrescoContextPath = /alfresco
alfrescoHost = http://localhost
httpMethod = GET
webscriptsParams = {f}[], {p}[], {alfUrl}[http://localhost/alfresco]
webScriptURL = /ui/awprmyspaces

Now the problems.

1.-Even though I can see the webscript, I am only able to visualize the default user space. When I give clic to the root or another folder in the path, I always go to the default path (like refreshing the webscript ). In other words the webscript is not taking into account the path of which folder I want to see. The thing is that when I call the webscript directly to tomcat (http://localhost:8080/wcservice/ui/awprmyspaces?alfUrl=http://localhost/alfresco ) from firefox it works fine, but from liferay it doesnt.The problem is basically that if I go directly to alfresco server it works, but If I dont and I call the webscript from liferay (awpr) and passing throughout the proxy it doesnt work, maybe it is a simple error but I havent worked with proxies until now. If you have any idea please tell me.

2.-Our alfresco repository contains some folders with latin chars like í, ó. So Awpr portlet its failing because it doesnt encode properly the folder name, I dont know why, but I checked the logs and it is sending the latin chars not being encoded as alfUrl param. However for example it is encoding spaces or other chars. Any idea what to do?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Diego

Hi Diego,

What kind of error are you getting with the folder names? Can you please post the error in AWPr's jira?

http://issues.rivetlogic.com/browse/AWPR

Thanks,

–Alaaeldin

Hello Alaaeldin,

Thanks for you quick response. I already posted the error on AWPr´s Jira.

http://issues.rivetlogic.com/browse/AWPR-2

Thanks a lot ,

Diego

Hi Alaaeldin,

I saw your solution about my problem but I'm not sure to understand. Please correct me If I misunderstood the cause. But according with your explanation, you will add an extra option to select the encoding type (UTF-8, ISO-8859-1) when sending the params in the portlet. But its supposed that UTF-8 is covering latin chars and many others right? I this is true why the portlet is required to use ISO-8859-1?

And about my first problem :
1.-Even though I can see the webscript, I am only able to visualize the default user space. When I give clic to the root or another folder in the path, I always go to the default path (like refreshing the webscript ). In other words the webscript is not taking into account the path of which folder I want to see. The thing is that when I call the webscript directly to tomcat (http://localhost:8080/wcservice/ui/awpr … t/alfresco ) from firefox it works fine, but from liferay it doesnt.The problem is basically that if I go directly to alfresco server it works, but If I dont, and I call the webscript from liferay (awpr) and passing throughout the proxy it doesnt work.
Do you have any clue to follow?

Thanks so much for your effort with this project,

Diego

Hi Diego,

The character encoding restriction you will find is related to the database. By default (if I'm not mistaken) MySQL is set to use Latin-1 as the characterset:

mysql> status;
————–
mysql  Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.51b, for apple-darwin9.0.0b5 (i686) using readline 5.0

Connection id:      71
Current database:   
Current user:      root@localhost
SSL:         Not in use
Current pager:      stdout
Using outfile:      ''
Using delimiter:   ;
Server version:      5.0.51b-log MySQL Community Server (GPL)
Protocol version:   10
Connection:      Localhost via UNIX socket
Server characterset:   latin1
Db     characterset:   latin1
Client characterset:   latin1
Conn.  characterset:   latin1
UNIX socket:      /tmp/mysql.sock
Uptime:         4 days 22 hours 27 min 10 sec

Threads: 22  Questions: 203200  Slow queries: 0  Opens: 175  Flush tables: 1  Open tables: 169  Queries per second avg: 0.477
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

So what's happening here is that the webscript fails o find the path to the folder because the encoding is UTF-8. If your server configuration ensures the use of utf8 then things should work using UTF-8. I decided to make the character encoding a portlet preference to make AWPr more flexible.

Now regarding your other issue. It's related to the same character encoding problem. What's happening is that the way MySpaces and AWPrMySpaces are written is that if the folder you're trying to navigate to does not exist it will default to the user's home folder. Do your folders that have latin characters in them are failing and the webscript is sending you to the logged in user's Alfresco home folder.

Hope this helps.

–Alaaeldin

Diego,

Another thing I noticed is that your Alfresco proxy setting should probably be fixed.

Currently it's set as follows:

http://localhost/alfresco [http://localhost:8080/alfresco]

You should set it like so:

http://localhost/alfresco* [http://localhost:8080/alfresco]

I have tested it with mod_jk, but if you want to use another proxy make sure you can access the Alfresco webclient using the following url:

http://localhost/alfresco

Cheers,

–Alaaeldin

AWPr 1.1.0 has been released and has new features that address the use cases and issues we've received from the AWPr users.

The main features are: (see the wiki for more details)

- Control over the AWPr javascript variable

- Control over which Web script URLs should be proxied

- Control over what type of encoding to use for request parameters

You can download AWPr 1.1.0 here.

Please use this forum if you have any questions about the new features.

Thanks,

–Alaaeldin

I would like to use your portlet but I need to change something: I need a user on Alfresco called liferayguest and I need to change the authenticator you provide to authenticate a guest user on Liferay as a liferayguest on Alfresco. This is because guest users should be able to contribute on Alfresco using an Alfresco portlet.

I think I need to customize the Star amp (is it correct?) and so I'm looking for the source code of this amp, but I could not find them. Could you help me, please?

Thank you
Marco

Hi,

What's happening is that the MySpaces webscript adds a cookie with the Alfresco ticket in it to the client browser when the webscript is first rendered. Subsequent calls to the Alfresco download servlet will then be authenticated as the Liferay user.

The portlet will call the Alfresco login webscript initially to get an Alfresco ticket for the Liferay user. As a side note, this ticket is sent on every request from the AWPr portlet instance to Alfresco via a URL argument called 't'. This is to allow webscript authors to do whatever they want with that ticket.

If you copied the Alfresco download URL and pasted it into a browser that doesn't have the Alfresco cookie you will be redirected to the Alfresco login page. But if you add the parameter 'ticket=TICKET_<ticket-value>' you will be able to download the document if the user who owns the ticket has read rights on it.

The drawback here is that you wouldn't be able to robustly have more than one portlet on the same portal page displaying webscripts that serve download URLs from different unclustered Alfresco servers because the cookie would keep getting overwritten. The only way would be to append the ticket to the download URL like so:
/alfresco/d/d/workspace/SpacesStore/771fbc61-d11a-4685-8a4d-143c310d07f0/image.png?ticket=TICKET_fb8dfe0f9fdf48b62e428fbe8f6665ddab01db55
‍‍‍
This is ok but not desirable since accessing this URL from any browser will authenticate the request as that user which could pose a security risk.

–Alaaeldin

Hi,

Changing STAr's code won't help. When you're not logged in to Liferay and access an AWPr portlet it will try to access the webscript as a guest user. To do what you want you will need to change the code of AWPr, not STAr. You will need to change the code that attempts to access the webscript as an Alfresco guest user and make it get a ticket for a hardcoded user called 'liferayguest'.

Hope this helps,

–Alaaeldin

Thank you very much for your quick response.
I'll work on AWPr as you suggested, but I would like to have anyway the source code of STAr.
Could you please tell me where can I get it?

Thank you
Marco

Hi,

Changing STAr's code won't help. When you're not logged in to Liferay and access an AWPr portlet it will try to access the webscript as a guest user. To do what you want you will need to change the code of AWPr, not STAr. You will need to change the code that attempts to access the webscript as an Alfresco guest user and make it get a ticket for a hardcoded user called 'liferayguest'.

Hope this helps,

–Alaaeldin

Sure thing:

https://svn.rivetlogic.org/repos/rivets/utils/star/

Please also be mindful of the licensing for STAr (GPL) and AWPr (AGPL).

Thanks,

–Alaaeldin

Hi Rivet, hi all…
I have a question, maybe silly, but it's a boring issue to me, I hope you can help me.
I have an AWPr portlet in liferay firts page and what I'd like is that webscript call succeed if liferay current user is an alfresco valid user too and fails otherwise. But it happens that I log in liferay and suddenly a new user appears in alfresco with username as liferay e-mail. I can nor delete nor modify new alfresco user. Why is this happening? Is it correct? It sounds strange to me…but I'm newbie so there are many things I don't understand

Smiley Surprised

ops:

Waiting for your opinions 🙂
Have a nice day!

EDIT: If I create a alfresco user with id = liferay mail it works, but as soon I log in liferay with an user not in alfresco it creates it in alfresco.

Hi,

You might find the following thread helpful in answering some of your questions:

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1720

Cheers,

–Alaaeldin

AWPr 1.2.0 has been released and has a new feature: (see the wiki for more details)

- A new portlet preference called proxyAllUrls to allow an AWPr instance to proxy all webscript URLs. Setting proxyAllUrls to true (which is the default) will make AWPr ignore the value set for proxyUrls.

You can download AWPr 1.2.0 here.

Please use this forum if you have any questions about the new features.

Thanks,

–Alaaeldin

Hi,

You might find the following thread helpful in answering some of your questions:

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1720

Cheers,

–Alaaeldin

Thanks Alaaeldin!
It was very usefull. 🙂

Hi,

Thanks for your work, Alaaeldin.

I'm having problems working with:

Liferay Portlet 5.2.2

Alfresco Labs 3Stable Have everyone connected them?.

I thought it was imposibble because:

Alfresco 3Stable CIFS share becomes unstable with "UserTransaction being garbage collected without a commit() or rollback()." error

, see https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETHREEOH-1553 for more information.

Best,

David Navarro.

Sure thing:

https://svn.rivetlogic.org/repos/rivets/utils/star/

Please also be mindful of the licensing for STAr (GPL) and AWPr (AGPL).

Thanks,

–Alaaeldin

Is the STAr still required to use AWPr 1.2? Alfresco 3.1 does not seem to pick up the AMP for STAr 1.0. We are using JBoss EPP 4.3 with Alfresco 3.1 Labs.

Hi,

According to our testing STAr does work with Alfresco 3.1 Enterprise. Maybe you're facing the issue related to the fact that the contents of chaining-authentication-context.xml are different depending on which Alfresco version you're using.

Please refer to the following wiki page for assistance:

http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/AWPr/STAr

Make sure your chaining-authentication-context.xml has the contents in the Alfresco 3.1 section of that wiki page.

[EDIT] Note: STAr is needed for all versions of AWPr

Hope this helps,

–Alaaeldin

Hi,

Thanks for your work, Alaaeldin.

   I'm having problems working with:
Liferay Portlet 5.2.2
Alfresco Labs 3Stable
   Have everyone connected them?.

   I thought it was imposibble because:
Alfresco 3Stable CIFS share becomes unstable with "UserTransaction being garbage collected without a commit() or rollback()." error
, see https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETHREEOH-1553 for more information.

Thanks for the kind words

I don't think this issue is relevant when using AWPr since you would be deploying Alfresco and Liferay on two separate JVMs.

Best,

–Alaaeldin