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Triggering a 're-render' of Web Forms content

grumpy_burton

Hi there,

A quick question, is there a way to trigger a re-render of all content in a web project (that is managed by Web Form/XForm)?

i.e. I have a bunch of already entered (or imported XML) and then decide to add Rendering Engine (could be an additional one or even edit an existing one).

Can I trigger alfresco to go an re-render all the content ?

Cheers,
Alex.

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arielb

there is no way to do this yet. please file a feature request.

grumpy_burton

Raised a feature request:
http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/WCM-413

In meantime, can you think of any work arounds to get the content to render? Can we programmically walk the content tree and re-generate it? or is that interface hidden too deep in the GUI code?

edgar

We have the same issue. What we are doing is the following:
* Create Web Forms for content elements that will be placed on web pages. E.g. a "crosslink menu", a "news item", etc.
* Create a Web Form for the web page. This Web Form has fields like "pagetitle" and has fields of type anyURI so that a content manager can add links to the content items created by the Web Forms for the content elements
* Create a (XSLT) template that renders the web page (the XML created by the page Web Form) and also renders the included content elements.

Now, when any of the included content elements change we need to re-render the page. In the future I hope that Alfresco can take care of this process altogether. In many other web CMS's the included content elements knows that it is included on the page and can automatically trigger a re-render of this page.

For now we see it as a "workaround" that a content manager has to manually re-render the page. We would like to build an automated way of doing this. And indeed possible a re-render of the entire web site (in our case: all web pages).

regards,

Edgar

kvc

Everyone:

Done and done. We'll add to our investigate list for 2.1. We will update you all once we've confirmed whether or not this can be fixed for our 2.1 release.

Kevin

edgar

Done and done.

What exactly are you done with Kevin? 😉

We'll add to our investigate list for 2.1. We will update you all once we've confirmed whether or not this can be fixed for our 2.1 release.

Excellent! Thanks.

But to come back to the earlier question: can you think of a workaround in the meantime? Because of this particular issue we are even in the process of implementing our own rendering process (XSLT stuff) outside of Alfresco (using JSP taglibs) so that we can render for example menu's that need to be updated a lot at runtime (when the JSP is loaded in the web site) instead of "render time" (i.e. within Alfresco).

kvc

Unfortunately not done with anything! Just a catch phrase to mean, "roger that; on it"

In the meantime, I would recommend building a custom JSP tag that either uses our RMI interface to the AVM or goes off the CIFS mount. If you put that in your WEB-INF dir in your sandbox, should be able to virtualize and test.

Another suggestion: generate the menu as a static fragment and use a simple JSP or server-side include (SSIs for HTML pages are virtualizable).

The trick for enabling re-generation is that the contents of a web project first must be indexed for search. That is a core capability being added for 2.1.0. So, unfortunately, we have a dependency first that we need to address - but we'll definately look to add.

Kevin

edgar

In the meantime, I would recommend building a custom JSP tag that either uses our RMI interface to the AVM or goes off the CIFS mount.
[..]
Another suggestion: generate the menu as a static fragment and use a simple JSP or server-side include (SSIs for HTML pages are virtualizable).
[..]

Funny. We have exactly this discussion here: shall we go for a runtime taglib solution (off the CIFS interface) or for a JSP include solution. Do you think the JSP include solution would be suitable for all content items that are included on a web page (which itself again is a content item)? And not just this menu example.

Say I have a web page on which I load a number of content items such as a news item, a banner and a service menu. All of these three items could be included as JSP snippets by my page template I think. The Web Forms for these content items have their own "component template" attached to them which generates the relevant JSP snippets. A content manager when building the page then selects these JSP snippets to be included (using anyURI elements).

This way the page is assembled of its elements at runtime and you can always be sure that the latest version of the included elements in shown on the page.

The trick for enabling re-generation is that the contents of a web project first must be indexed for search. That is a core capability being added for 2.1.0. So, unfortunately, we have a dependency first that we need to address - but we'll definately look to add.

Using the CIFS interface it should not be too hard to write a script that simply re-saves all .XML content files in a Web Project should it? When a content file is re-saved the rendering process for that content item (based on a certain Web Form) is triggered, right? The only problem is: you don't know which content items to re-save, you will touch them all, which is a bit of a shame.

arielb

a save via the cifs mount will unfortunately not trigger a regenerate of renditions, it has to be either an update or edit via the ui.

kvc

Say I have a web page on which I load a number of content items such as a news item, a banner and a service menu. All of these three items could be included as JSP snippets by my page template I think. The Web Forms for these content items have their own "component template" attached to them which generates the relevant JSP snippets. A content manager when building the page then selects these JSP snippets to be included (using anyURI elements).

This way the page is assembled of its elements at runtime and you can always be sure that the latest version of the included elements in shown on the page.

Yes and yes! This is *exactly* the right approach. You can then have forms for (a) creating a discrete content item (b) creating a component (a JSP that gets included other web pages, where the form used to create the JSP captures all relevent attributes from an end-user to generate a snippet of dynamic text - for example, having a Most Recent component where the form captures things like # of items to display, sort order, and metadata / content fields to output in display list) and © creating a page (where the form captures from end user which components to use on a page, where to position, etc. - generating a JSP page with all the appropriate includes.

Moving forward, we will be updating our publishing wizard to enable a WYSIWYG presentation for these types of page forms (drag-and-drop component references), where you can launch the underlying forms associated with an individual component for customizing the included item (double-click on a Most Recent component to fill out it's form details).

So, this is exactly the right approach - and makes wonderful use of the virt server to test a dynamic site! Also, empowers business users to build dynamic web pages - without a developers assistance for creating every single JSP.

Kevin

edgar

Hi Kevin,

thanks for the reply. Sounds like we're on the right track. Some more questions related to your answers:

(b) creating a component (a JSP that gets included other web pages, where the form used to create the JSP captures all relevent attributes from an end-user to generate a snippet of dynamic text - for example, having a Most Recent component where the form captures things like # of items to display, sort order, and metadata / content fields to output in display list)

What exactly do you mean by "Most Recent"? Do you see that this "Most Recent" functionality is implemented in JSP code which is executed at run-time (i.e. when the web page is requested from the servlet engine (assuming the web site is deployed to a standalone servlet engine outside Alfresco)?) instead of "render-time" (i.e. when the template associated with the Web Form is rendered inside Alfresco)?

What we want to do, is to use JSP logic to dynamically (run-time) generate what we call "components that reflect the web site structure". For example, take the navigation menu on the left-hand-site of the products page of the Alfresco site. We feel that at the moment we cannot render this particular menu from inside Alfresco (using templates) because the content manager would then need to regenerate this menu component every time a new page is added to the site structure that is shown here. And the problem is: how does a content manager know that some other content manager has done this in the first place? We cannot explain to a content manager: if some colleague of yours has added a new page to the site in this and this position in the site structure you will need to open and re-save all of the following web pages, etc.

So our idea is: the content manager should not need to manage anything for this menu. The page template should include JSP logic (which itself can be an included JSP of course) which generates this menu on the fly (run-time). This does require that a bunch of logic needs to be present at run-time (i.e. in the servlet engine). For this we are writing a JSP custom tag lib.

However, moving forward, of course ideally we would like this kind of functionality to be present within Alfresco itself. How do you see this?

Moving forward, we will be updating our publishing wizard to enable a WYSIWYG presentation for these types of page forms (drag-and-drop component references), where you can launch the underlying forms associated with an individual component for customizing the included item (double-click on a Most Recent component to fill out it's form details).

Sounds excellent!

So, this is exactly the right approach - and makes wonderful use of the virt server to test a dynamic site! Also, empowers business users to build dynamic web pages - without a developers assistance for creating every single JSP.

Indeed. We want to empower our business users even more in fact by limiting the choice they have in selecting the component references to be put on a page. We are used to other web content management systems where, together with the component reference you include in a Web Form you specify the exact type of component that can be referenced. In case of Alfresco: we would like to say: this is an anyURI field to some component (content item), but the content manager should only be allowed to select components that are based on Web Form X, or Web Form X and Y. For example this will be used to enable the content manager to click together a "news menu" where the component references only refer to news item components (i.e. components based on the Web Form "news item") and not on any other components.

Two questions here:
a/ Are there plans to include this functionality in a future version of Alfresco?
b/ Was is the best way to approach this in Alfresco 2.0? The WCM tutorial uses a Web Form that has an included JSP which "pre-populates" a list of items that can be selected by the content manager for a specific field. Maybe that is something we could use here?

Oh yes, a final question. How does all this relate to the Alfresco Web Site Framework (WSF) initiative?

cheers,

Edgar

edgar

I just wondered if there has been any work done in this area in Alfresco 2.1.0 Community?

edgar

I just wondered if there has been any work done in this area in Alfresco 2.1.0 Community?

Ah, there has been!

Kevin pointed me out to the new exciting feature "Regenerate Renditions" where you can have Alfresco re-render content items based on a particular Web Form.

A question on this: I see that it only picks up content items in the staging sandbox, not in any user sandboxes. Is this by design?

Ideally I would like to be able to regenerate the renditions in my user sandbox and after that put them through the workflow instead of effecting the staging sandbox directly. Is this possible?

cheers,

Edgar

kvc

Edgar:

Ah! No, today the changes are down directly against Staging. You do, however, get an opportunity to preview your changes and tweak your templates for potential regeneration before flattening though.

Technically, everything should be done in a user sandbox and promoted to staging with an opp for intermediating workflow. In this case, since we had the dynamic preview capability, and since frankly we were a bit short on time, we just did the targeting of regen to Staging. That was more of a convenience because the additional UI bit of allowing to the user to select which sandbox to regen in was not necessary (every project has Staging). Thought this was relatively safe because the person doing the regen would be more of a developer type anyway (or some other senior person will access to the data dictionary).

If you'd like to update the UI bits to allow for this, please do! And contribute back to us!

Kevin