Sunday, October 05, 2008

Custom dashlets (alfresco again)

I couldn't believe it, is it me or is it alfresco documentation that sometimes seems to be unfriendly. Here's the case, I was thinking of having my own dashlet, I went to http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/User_Configurable_Dashboards#Writing_Dashboard_Components, done creating the jsp page, I didn't know how to make my dashlet appears on the "magic list" of dashlet components.

I then read from a source which told me to add my dashlet to the web-client-config.xml, tried that and it was successfull. But I was still curious where did I do wrong during reading the manual that I didn't even notice that configuration file, it turns out that the section that explain about the configuration file is "Configuring Available Components", and down below on the section "Writing Dashboard Components" doesn't put any clue that I have to add/register the new dashlet over there (at that time I just skimmed through the configuring part since it says "available" component).

I guess I have to read alfresco's documentation thoroughly and carefully, but I'm not being ungrateful here, I'm really do grateful for Alfresco, but please if a nice and friendly sample could be written, please write it for people like me.

Just a reminder for me on how to create a dashlet :
  1. Prepare a template (free marker) and put it in WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/template (I believe this step is optional)
  2. Prepare the jsp page that refer to the template (if you create one) and put the jsp file in jsp/dashboards/dashlets (should it always be this directory? got to find out, not now though.. I wanna sleep)
  3. Add/register the newly created dashlet to web-client-config.xml in WEB-INF/classes/alfresco

Once again, I'm grateful for Alfresco but I'll be more grateful if there could be a friendlier documentation (or could I help?)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

This seems to be what you're looking for
http://blogs.citytechinc.com/jkraus/?p=3

Anonymous said...

Hi Santosa,

Do you have any complete post that could help us to create a dashlet. Alfresco documentation is quite hard.

Thanks
Joe

Santoso said...

Hi Joe,


Pls take a look at this post http://livinginjava.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-to-create-custom-dashlet-in.html


Hope that helps,

Santoso

Anonymous said...

Don't know if it solves your issue but for Alfresco Share you can add your dashlet to
webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/webscripts/
and then refresh the web scripts in
http://youralfresco/share/service/

karthik said...

Hi Santoso,

I saw your profile and your service to help others.I need a help from you in this time.

I am new to Alfresco.Now i am using alfresco community 3.4.d and also i try to create a custom advanced workflow.During Deployment i got an error "Failed to deploy workflow definition"

Plz tell how to solve this issue.
Thanks in advance,

Karthik