Introduction

This project provides a custom dashlet that lists 'expired' content owned by the current user, plus a full-page report implemented as a custom Surf page.

Content is considered to have expired when the value of its cm:to date property (part of the out-of-the-box Effectivity aspect) is in the past. Ownership is specified explicitly by the value of the cm:owner (part of the out-of-the-box Ownable aspect) property, which should be set the username of the owner.

Applying Expiration Policies

To allow expiration dates to be set automatically based on a simple policy, a custom aspect named Validity is supplied in a custom model. The aspect specifies a Validity Period property value, which defines how long that content item should be considered valid for before a further review is necessary.

Three JavaScript files are provided to manage expiration policies, based on the aspect data. You must download the scripts to your computer and add them to the repository's Data Dictionary/Scripts space in order to use them.

The script apply-expiration.js is allows a default validity period (3 months) to be set against content items. The script can be run against a single document or against a folder. In the latter case it will recurse through the folder contents and apply the policy to all documents below that level.

In addition to setting the validity period (if not already set), the script also sets the content owner to the user who created the content, and sets an initial expiration date by adding the validity period to the last modified time stamp.

After adding the script to the Data Dictionary/Scripts space, you can run it from the Run Action dialogue in Alfresco Explorer, or using the ExecuteScriptAction add-on. If you want to apply expiration to all documents added below a specific folder then you can set up a rule to automatically run the script against new documents.

After the action has run the Validity Period and Owner can be changed at any time using the Edit Metadata page for the document. The expiration date cannot be set directly, only indirectly via the validity period.

To allow the expiration date to be extended when the document is reviewed, another script update-expiration.js is provided. Like apply-expiration.js this can be run on-demand from Explorer or via the ExecuteScriptAction action, but since this will be used more frequently by users you may wish to configure the custom action also supplied (see #Custom_Action_Installation_(Optional), below), which will allow users to run the script with a single click.

Alternatively you can also set up a content rule to execute update-expiration.js whenever a user updates the content item. This may be preferable to adding custom actions in some circumstances.

A third script remove-expiration.js will remove the expiration metadata from a content item that you no longer wish to be managed in this way. You can run this on a document or on a folder to remove the metadata from all documents below that level.

You can also manually remove content expiration metadata from items by using Share's Manage Aspects dialogue, to remove the Validity and Effectivity aspects.

Installation

The add-on has been developed to install on top of an existing Alfresco 3.3 or 3.4 installation.

To install the action, drop the content-expiration.jar file into the tomcat/shared/lib folder within your Alfresco installation, and restart the application server. You might need to create this folder if it does not already exist.

Custom Action Installation (Optional)

Once the JAR file has been deployed into your application server, you can need to configure the Share application to display the action.

Firstly, copy the web script configuration file WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/site-webscripts/org/alfresco/components/documentlibrary/documentlist.get.config.xml from the Share webapp into the directory alfresco/web-extension/site-webscripts/org/alfresco/components/documentlibrary in Tomcat’s shared/classes to override it. You should see a section <actionSet id="document"> which defines all the actions shown for a normal document in the document list view.

To add the action to this list, add the following line just before the </actionset> element for that block.

<action type="action-link" id="onActionUpdateExpiration" permission="edit" label="actions.document.update-expiration" />

To make the action appear for folder items in addition to documents, add the same line into the section <actionSet id="folder">.

If you also want the action to show up in the document details view, you need to copy the file WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/site-webscripts/org/alfresco/components/document-details/document-actions.get.config.xml into alfresco/web-extension/site-webscripts/org/alfresco/components/document-details in shared/classes, and add the extra <action> definition in the same way.

Lastly, you need to ensure that the client-side JS and CSS assets get pulled into the UI as unfortunately the config files do not allow us to specify these dependencies.

To do this, you must override the file WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/site-webscripts/org/alfresco/components/documentlibrary/actions-common.get.head.ftl. Copy this into the directory alfresco/web-extension/site-webscripts/org/alfresco/components/documentlibrary in shared/classes and add the following lines at the bottom of the file.

<#-- Update Expiration Action -->
<@link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="${page.url.context}/res/extras/components/documentlibrary/update-expiration-action.css" />
<@script type="text/javascript" src="${page.url.context}/res/extras/components/documentlibrary/update-expiration-action.js"></@script>

Once you have made these changes you will need to restart Tomcat so that the configuration and your classpath resources in the JAR file are picked up.

Note: If you want the action to appear in the repository browsing pages or in Web Quick Start or DOD sites, you will also need to update the corresponding .config.xml and .head.ftl files for those page components.

Building from Source

Check out the project if you have not already done so

svn checkout http://share-extras.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Content%20Expiration

Change into the new directory

cd "Content Expiration"

An Ant build script is provided to build a JAR file containing the custom files, which can then be installed into the tomcat/shared/lib folder of your Alfresco installation.

To build the JAR file, run the following command from the base project directory.

ant clean dist-jar

The command should build a JAR file named content-expiration.jar in the dist directory within your project, which you can then copy into the tomcat/shared/lib folder of your Alfresco installation.

Alternatively, you can use the build script to hot deploy the JAR file directly into a local Tomcat instance for testing. You will need to use the hotcopy-tomcat-jar task and set the tomcat.home property in Ant.

ant -Dtomcat.home=C:/Alfresco/tomcat clean dist-jar hotcopy-tomcat-jar

After you have deployed the JAR file you will need to restart Tomcat to ensure it picks up the changes.

See #Custom_Action_Installation_(Optional), above for the additional steps, which are required after installing the JAR file to configure the optional Update Expiration action into the Document Library.

Usage

1. Log in to Alfresco Share and navigate to your user dashboard.
2. Click the Customize Dashboard button to edit the contents of the dashboard and drag the dashlet into one of the columns from the list of dashlets.
3. You can view the full report for your expired content items by clicking the Full Report link at the top of the dashlet.
4. Once on the full page, you can change the URL to display the report for another user, or use the username 'all' to display all expired content across all sites.