BRob On Tech

In parts 1 and 2 of this series, I discussed how to optimize XML Metadata Extraction in your Alfresco WCM environment, and how (and why) to disable permissions checking, respectively.  Besides those two optimizations, there are several other things that you can do to tweak an Alfresco System Receiver (ASR) for better performance, which I will discuss now.

First, optimize your JVM settings!  By default, Alfresco ships with a maximum heap size of 512MB of RAM.  As such, under high load, an ASR can max out a heap of that size and thus serve content a bit more slowly.  So you definitely want to increase the maximum heap size to as high as you can.  Also, depending on how you set up your minimum and maximum heap sizes, you may want to adjust the size of newly allocated heap space using the -XX:NewSize command line option.  There are a few other things you can adjust as well regarding your JVM like enabling hotspot pre-compilation, and the size of the stack, amongst others.  See the JVM Tuning page on the Alfresco wiki for more details.  Ultimately for my testing on my Macbook Pro running Alfresco on Windows XP via VMWare Fusion, I used the following settings (in alfresco.bat):

set JAVA_OPTS=-Xms768m -Xmx1536m -Xss1m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -Xcomp -Xbatch -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+CMSIncrementalMode -XX:NewSize=384m -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=80 -server


Speaking of virtualization, that reminds me.  Don’t virtualize!  For best performance, use the actual hardware!  Virtualization adds overhead.  I have not yet tested ASR performance without virtualization to be able to prove the impact that it has, but I will, and when I do, you can be sure that I’ll update this post, so come back sometime soon!

Anyway, now that you’ve tuned the JVM, what about the database?  Increasing the size of the database connection pool will enable your ASR to handle more concurrent users.  Therefore, in custom-repository.properties in your extension directory (Alfresco 3.x) or in alfresco-global.properties (Alfresco 3.2+), you can set the following:

db.pool.initial=10
db.pool.max=350


In addition to increasing the database thread pool, you should increase the tomcat thread pool as well.  This can be done by modifying the following line in alfresco/tomcat/conf/server.xml:

<Executor name="tomcatThreadPool" namePrefix="catalina-exec-"
maxThreads="350" minSpareThreads="4"/>

Now that we’ve tuned some parts of the server, let’s turn off some things we don’t need.  For example, you should remove the share web application (share.war) that is installed with Alfresco by default, as well as Web Studio (studio.war) and the mobile web application (mobile.war) if you’re running Alfresco Community.  Be sure to remove (or just move elsewhere) all of the unneeded .war files as well as their exploded directories.  The only application you need on an ASR is alfresco.war.  Additionally, you may want to download a clean copy of alfresco.war (making sure you have the correct version for your installation), and be sure NOT to apply the SharePoint Protocol AMP file to it.  No sense running another listener that no one will ever use!  Also, you typically want to lock down an ASR so that content is only accessed by your web application via the web scripts you’ve authored to expose your web content.  Therefore, you don’t need to be running virtual filesystems such as CIFS for shared drives, and FTP.  This can be done very simply, by setting the following in custom-repository.properties (3.1) or alfresco-global.properties (3.2):

ftp.enabled=false
cifs.enabled=false


Another very useful exercise is to optimize your web scripts.  For example, if you have a page in your web application that has three content areas managed by Alfresco, don’t have the web application call three separate web scripts, each of which returns only content related to that area.  Network hops are expensive, so they should be minimized to just one hop per page type.  In this scenario, performance would likely be improved by having the web application call a single web script per page type which returns all of the content to be displayed by that page at that time.

That leads to the next point: build caching into your web application, or as a layer between your web application and Alfresco, and be sure to determine and implement a cache update strategy.  If the web application can simply hit a cache that is local to it while the cache is updated asynchronously via some other process, the web application will fly as compared to making calls to the ASR every single time a user views a page.

To conclude, here’s a handy list of steps you can take to optimize ASR performance, from my estimation of decreasing impact:

1. Cache
2. Turn permissions checking off
3. Optimize your web scripts per page type on your web site
4. Don’t virtualize
5. Tune your JVM for performance
6. Increase the database connection pool
7. Increase the tomcat thread pool
8. Remove/disable things you don’t need
   • CIFS Server
   • FTP Server
   • Share
   • Web Studio
   • Mobile
   • SharePoint Protocol (SPP) support
9. Configure XML metadata extraction so that it occurs on your authoring server, not the ASR

If you have additional suggestions, please share, I’d love to hear them!

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In my first post in this series, I discussed how and where to set up XML Metadata extraction in an Alfresco WCM environment to optimize Alfresco System Receiver (ASR) performance.  Though this is a useful optimization, it’s probably not the #1 most important thing you can optimize.  ASRs are designed to enable the retrieval of content, so optimizing that process is going to provide the most impactful results.

One of the major features Alfresco brings to the table as an ECM system is the ability to secure content by user, group, or role (or some combination thereof).  As such, when searches are carried out on behalf of a user, results are pruned by default by the Alfresco PermissionService, thus only returning results that the authenticated user has read access to.

In the case of an ASR though, content is typically retrieved by a single calling application using a single login.  This very common scenario does not require “pruning” of content that the calling application is trying to retrieve.  Avoiding the unnecessary (and expensive) calls to the database for permission checking, particularly as the resulting content set grows in size, would yield significant savings in response time.  Therefore, it is very simple in Alfresco to turn off permissions checking via configuration, which will turn off permission checking repository wide.  Note that this should be done with extreme care - not all use cases are created the same, so be sure to fully evaluate your specific requirements before taking this action.

In my tests, the response time with permission checking turned off was 33% faster on average over comparative tests for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, and 110 concurrent users.  See beautiful chart reflecting these numbers:

To disable permission checking for your entire repository, simply rename “alfresco/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/unsecured-public-services-security-context.xml.sample” to “alfresco/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/unsecured-public-services-security-context.xml” in your installation.  Note that I found a defect in 3.1.1 Enterprise and 3.2 Community regarding this issue.  You will need to use the “unsecured-public-services-security-context.xml.sample” file attached to this issue: https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETHREEOH-2604 instead of the one that the installer lays down for you.

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In this first part of what I expect to be a few posts about Alfresco System Receiver (ASR) optimizations, I’ll talk specifically about XML Metadata Extractors for Alfresco Web Content Management (WCM).  So what is an XML metadata extractor, and why should you care about it?  Let’s put it in the context of a diagram:

In the diagram above we see that the WCM authoring environment is configured with web forms.  This allows business users to enter content into the system; an article to be published for example.  To do so, the user does not have to be skilled in web related technologies, such as HTML; they simply fill out a form with the content to be published.  Once their content is entered it is saved as XML, submitted to the staging sandbox, and ultimately deployed, in this case to an ASR.  The ASR is seen as being configured with an XML Metadata Extractor and a DM content model, which defines aspects that will be applied to the deployed content.  So for an article content type on the authoring side, there would be an article aspect defined in the content model on the ASR.  The XML metadata extractor is used to extract content from the deployed content (the article) and store is according to the aspect defined in the DM content model.  As such, the content delivered via the web form can be indexed by Lucene, enabling optimized search performance on retrieval.

The problem with this approach is that the ASR is likely serving a live production web site that may have thousands (or more) visitors:

As such, it is less than ideal to have the ASR execute the processing required to extract metadata from the XML content on the ASR itself.  Wouldn’t it be better if that was done on the authoring server?  You bet it would.  Hence the first ASR optimization; perform XML metadata extraction in the authoring environment:

By configuring the XML metadata extraction to occur on the authoring environment, we save some cycles on the ASR, which is certainly a good thing if we’re using it to back a high traffic web site.

One last note: for assistance setting up XML metadata extraction for WCM, see this page on the Alfresco wiki.

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Recently I’ve been working on a REST API for reporting workflow status information in Alfresco.  After getting some of the functionality nailed down, it really bothered me that I wasn’t able to use Test Driven Development (TDD) in the process.  So I went looking, and I found quite a few open source tools out there in the wild that made good prospects for acceptance testing these REST APIs that I was working on.  It was time for a SMACKDOWN! OOOOOOOH YEAAAAAAAH!

Contender #1 - Selenium

I heard of Selenium in the past and have wanted to tinker with it for a long time, so I tried this one out first.  Note that Selenium is really just the “brand name”; there are actually several inter-related offerings here.  The first is Selenium IDE, which comes as an add-on to Firefox, which is pretty awesome.  Using this tool, you can basically record your tests, and play them back.  This is very easy to try out - literally within minutes I had recorded my first tests.

That was very cool, but I needed to test result sets with dynamic data, so I had to take a look at Selenium-RC, which has APIs that enable the use of your favorite programming language: Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby.  The good news with this tool is that it actually uses the real browser to do its testing.  That’s also the bad news.  For each and every test, a new Firefox was launched, which would certainly take a while as the test suite grew larger.  The main advantage that I saw with this tool is that it would be great for testing web applications with Javascript for cross-browser compatibility.  In fact, Selenium-RC is leveraged by Selenium Grid, which allows you to test cross-browser and on different operating systems.  I dig it, but I just have some simple REST APIs to test, so the whole Selenium suite is overkill for me.

Reporting of results using Selenium-RC ultimately would have to be via JUnit reporting mechanisms, which are pretty decent as I recall, but you will have an extra step to set that up in your Ant build file.

Oh, one other note.  You can use Selenium IDE to record your tests and export them as a Selenium-RC Java class.  Pretty cool, but the implementation felt like it was quick and dirty as I recall - something about the class name I gave it and the source that was generated was ‘off’.

Contender #2 - HTMLUnit

This is basically just a Java API that makes it easy to extract information from web pages programatically.  Because I knew that several other tools were built using HTMLUnit at the core, I didn’t spend any time investigating the possibility of using it directly, which was a smart decision.

Contender #3 - JWebTest

This one is cool in concept.  It’s basically an abstraction of Selenium and HTMLUnit.  If you want to test using HTMLUnit most of the time for speed but want to switch to Selenium for a cross browser sanity check from time to time, JWebTest could be your answer.  I spent maybe an hour setting it up in my environment and writing a test with it.  It didn’t handle HTTP basic authentication right out of the box (when using a URL like “http://admin:admin@localhost:8080/alfresco/my/rest/service.json”), whereas Selenium did handle such a URL properly.  I did look (just now) to see if it handles HTTP basic authentication, and it looks like it does via the API - see WebTestCase.getTestContext() and TestContext.setAuthorization().

Regardless, the bottom line with this is that it’s a Java based API that I would have to use to program all of my tests, and the ability to switch on “Selenium mode” isn’t very compelling to me for testing REST APIs.  Therefore, this one doesn’t really add much value over using HTMLUnit directly for this use case.

Contender #4 - Canoo WebTest

Initially, my first reaction regarding Canoo was “Oh man, I don’t like that it uses Ant so heavily”.  For reasons I won’t go into here, I’m using Ant (not Maven) as my build tool for this project, so ultimately, that’s not a deal breaker.  That said, getting up and running with Canoo was pretty awesome.  The instructions say to put the WebTest bin directory in your path, which generally bothers me, but I did it anyway.  Then there’s a way to generate a project skeleton (a very maven-esque thing to do), which I did, and by running their shell script within the generated test project’s directory, I was off and running.  I then created my own test files (in Ant based XML with custom Canoo tasks), plugged them into the main build script, and BOOYAH!  I was off to the races.

The execution of the tests is pretty fast, certainly faster than Selenium, and result reporting is tight:

Canoo WebTest also has the advantage that adding new tests is a declarative exercise - no programming and compilation required.  HTTP Basic authentication is handled nicely via simple attributes on the <invoke> step.  Here’s an example:

        <webtest name="Check end date capability for assigned tasks">
            <invoke url="http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/admin.json?endDate=2009-05-23"
                    description="Admin with end date 2009-05-23"
                    username="admin"
                    password="admin"/>
            <verifyText text='{"description":"Review","priority":2,"due":null,"properties":null,"percent":0,"completed":null,"status":"Not Yet Started","duration":null,"created":"2009-05-23 23:59:59.0","name":"wf:reviewTask"}'/>
            <not>
                <verifyText text='{"description":"Adhoc Task","priority":2,"due":null,"properties":null,"percent":0,"completed":null,"status":"Not Yet Started","duration":null,"created":"2009-05-24 00:00:00.0","name":"wf:adhocTask"}'/>
            </not>
        </webtest>

The Winner - Canoo WebTest

Just to spell it out clearly: Canoo is my tool of choice for REST API testing, due to ease of use, speed of execution, good reporting, and easy handling of HTTP basic authentication per test.  If/when I move to using a Maven build system, it looks like that’s alright by Canoo, since they have a maven plugin.

Other Alternatives

Other possibilities for folks out there are:

• Celerity - Ruby based testing framework.  Not for me since I’m not a Ruby wonk.
• JSFUnit - Specifically geared towards testing JSF applications, which is not the case here.
• WebDriver - Similar to Selenium, and is in fact rolling into Selenium according to the FAQ.  As such I didn’t look at this for longer than 5 minutes.

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As I was testing the functionality of the user based workflow status reporting API that I posted about recently, I discovered that the Javascript API for workflow in Alfresco only enabled viewing workflow related information for the authenticating user.  I however would like to enable monitoring by other users who are either administrators or members of a designated group, such as a “Managers” group of users who will monitor workflow statistics.  Fortunately, there is a convenient way to handle this thanks to the magic of the Spring Framework (upon which Alfresco is built).

As described on the wiki, you can add custom Javascript APIs that are backed by Java implementations.  In fact, it is via this mechanism that the documented Javascript API is exposed.  But for our workflow status reporting scenario, we want to replace the implementation of the exposed “workflow” object with an implementation that allows for our new authorization requirement.  Therefore we need to find where the current “workflow” object is configured.  A simple grep command revealed that this object (along with all of the others) is configured via the script-services-context.xml Spring configuration file, which has the following bean entry for workflow:

    <bean id="workflowScript" parent="baseJavaScriptExtension"
            class="org.alfresco.repo.workflow.jscript.WorkflowManager">
        <property name="extensionName">
            <value>workflow</value>
        </property>
        <property name="serviceRegistry">
            <ref bean="ServiceRegistry"/>
        </property>
    </bean>

Ideally, we would want to have all of the current capabilities that the WorkflowManager class already implements plus whatever our extension class would add to it via the ‘workflow’ object (including handling for our new authorization requirement in this case).  For some reason though, which I chose not to investigate thoroughly, extending an existing class intended for exposure via Javascript isn’t working the way I would have expected (see here for the JIRA report I filed about it).  Only the new public methods in my class were being exposed, despite the extension of the existing WorkflowManager class.

Since it’s not terribly critical though, we’ll just build a new class and expose a new object via Javascript.  We’ll call it WorkflowStatusManager and configure it via Spring as follows:

    <bean id="workflowScript" parent="baseJavaScriptExtension"
            class="org.alfresco.repo.workflow.jscript.WorkflowStatusManager">
        <property name="extensionName">
            <value>workflowstatus</value>
        </property>
        <property name="serviceRegistry">
            <ref bean="ServiceRegistry"/>
        </property>
    </bean>

Now we’re free to add parameterized accessors for assigned tasks and completed tasks (where the parameter will be the user authority for which to obtain results for).  As you can see, this class will have a reference to the ServiceRegistry from the Alfresco Java API, which can be used to gain access to a variety of services, including the WorkflowService which will be used in this case.

One addition that I’m considering adding into the Spring configuration would be a property to set the name(s) of the group(s) that should have access to other users’ workflow data.  If you have ideas for other workflow status reporting capabilities to expose to Javascript, please share!

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Now that I’ve had a chance to dig into implementing some of the workflow status reporting capabilities, it’s time to get a little more specific.  First, let’s take a look at the architecture.

As you can see from the image above, the workflow reporting web scripts will run on the Alfresco server, exposing information via JSON (and/or other formats) to other presentation layer technologies like Alfresco Share, JBoss Portal, etc.  Later on in this process Share dashlets or JSR-168 portlets can be written to consume and present the exposed data.

Because a lot of workflow information is already exposed via the Workflow JavaScript API, I’ll use JavaScript backed web scripts to expose the data as appropriate for the reports I want to generate.  I suspect that as I progress further, I may need to extend the workflow service at the Java level to expose additional workflow information.  If/when that happens, I’ll have a couple of choices for exposing that new information:

• Use Java-backed web scripts in conjunction with my existing JavaScript backed web scripts by extending DeclarativeWebScript
• Expose the newly implemented Java methods as Javascript properties or operations

For now though, I need to flesh out what the API will look like.  At this point I’m assuming that most custom workflows will extend the out of the box models, and will thus have certain metadata available for extraction and reporting.  Note that only JSON will be exposed for now.  Exposing XML, RSS, ATOM, or even an HTML representation of the data is easily possible though by using the Alfresco web scripts templating capabilities.

User

Returns current and historical workflow information for the authenticating user.  It’s also possible to request another user’s workflow information via the id parameter.

URL

http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user.format

Formats

JSON

HTTP Method(s)

GET

Requires Authentication

Yes, as the user for which workflow information is being requested or as an administrative role otherwise


Parameters

• id.  Optional.  Specifies the id of the user whose workflow information is being requested.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json
• startDate.  Optional.  Specifies the start date after which to retrieve workflow information.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?startDate=01-01-2008
• endDate.  Optional.  Specifies the end date before which to retrieve workflow information.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?endDate=12-31-2008 or http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?startDate=01-01-2008&endDate=12-31-2008
• timePeriod.  Optional.  Specifies the time period to use to delimit data, for example in a table or graph.  The value must be one of {daily, weekly, biweekly, bimonthly, monthly, quarterly, biannually, annually}. When specified, this parameter must be accompanied by either startDate, endDate, or both
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?startDate=01-01-2008&endDate=12-31-2008&timePeriod=monthly
• taskName. Optional. Specifies a taskName to filter by. Workflow information related to any other task will NOT be included if this parameter is specified.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/user/brobinson.json?taskName=wf:reviewTask
• sortBy.  Optional.  Specifies the parameter to sort by.  Must be one of {taskName, priority, duration, status, percent, dueDate, created, description}.
• showProperties.  Optional.  Specifies whether task properties should be included in the output for every task.

Response

{
      user: "brobinson",
      assignedTasks: [
            {
            	name: "wf:reviewTask",
                description: "Take a look",
                priority: 3,
                due: null,
                percent: 0,
                completed: null,
                status: "Not Yet Started",
                duration: null,
                created: "2009-05-12 10:25:52.51",
                properties: [
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}startDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}packageItemActionGroup",
                            value: "edit_package_item_actions"
                        },
						{
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}completionDate",
                            value: null
                        },
						{
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}percentComplete",
                            value: 0
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}context",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/707f218a-0967-4ebc-9bb4-872e9cb67597"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}priority",
                            value: 3
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}pooledActors",
                            value: "[]"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}package",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/f602c326-ea5f-40f0-91b4-21f27249aff7"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}packageActionGroup",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}owner",
                            value: "admin"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}dueDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}hiddenTransitions",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}description",
                            value: "Take a look"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}outcome",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}created",
                            value: "2009-05-12 10:25:52.51"
                        },
                        {
                        	key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}status",
                            value: "Not Yet Started"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}taskId",
                            value: 6586373
                        }
                  ]
            }, ...(truncated)...
      ],
      completedTasks: [
            {
            	name: "wf:submitReviewTask",
                description: "Hey, take a look at this, will you?",
                priority: 3,
                due: null,
                percent: 0,
                completed: "2009-04-15 16:22:49.808",
                status: "Completed",
                duration: 17.468,
                created: "2009-04-15 16:22:49.128",
                properties: [
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}startDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}packageItemActionGroup",
                            value: "start_package_item_actions"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}completionDate",
                            value: "2009-04-15 16:22:49.808"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}percentComplete",
                            value: 0
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}context",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/6c5bf7d2-806c-4f04-99bc-3a4b84ed7073"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}workflowDueDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}priority",
                            value: 3
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}pooledActors",
                            value: "[]"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}package",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/6c5bf7d2-806c-4f04-99bc-3a4b84ed7073"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}packageActionGroup",
                            value: "add_package_item_actions"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}assignee",
                            value: "workspace://SpacesStore/9a4684c8-18ef-4f3e-a119-e5bb08c9da52"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}owner",
                            value: "admin"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}workflowPriority",
                            value: 2
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}dueDate",
                            value: null
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}hiddenTransitions",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}description",
                            value: "Hey, take a look at this, will you?"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}outcome",
                            value: ""
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}created",
                            value: "2009-04-15 16:22:49.128"
                        },
                        {
                            key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}status",
                            value: "Completed"
                        },
                        {
                        	key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}taskId",
                            value: 2785280
                        },
                        {
                        	key: "{http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}workflowDescription",
                            value: "Hey, take a look at this, will you?"
                        }
                  ]
            }, ...(truncated)...
      ]

}

Group

Returns current and historical workflow information for the identified group

URL

http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.format

Formats

JSON

HTTP Method(s)

GET

Requires Authentication

Yes, as an administrative role


Parameters

• id.  Required.  Specifies the id of the user whose workflow information is being requested.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering
• startDate.  Optional.  Specifies the start date after which to retrieve workflow information.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&startDate=01-01-2008
• endDate.  Optional.  Specifies the end date before which to retrieve workflow information.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&endDate=12-31-2008 or http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&startDate=01-01-2008&endDate=12-31-2008
• timePeriod.  Optional.  Specifies the time period to use to delimit data, for example in a table or graph.  The value must be one of {daily, weekly, biweekly, bimonthly, monthly, quarterly, biannually, annually}. When specified, this parameter must be accompanied by either startDate, endDate, or both
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&startDate=01-01-2008&endDate=12-31-2008&timePeriod=monthly
• taskName. Optional. Specifies a taskName to filter by. Workflow information related to any other task will NOT be included if this parameter is specified.
  • Example: http://yourhost:8080/alfresco/service/api/workflow/status/group.json?id=Engineering&taskName=wf:reviewTask
• sortBy.  Optional.  Specifies the parameter to sort by.  Must be one of {taskName, priority, duration, status, percent, dueDate, created, description}.
• showProperties.  Optional.  Specifies whether task properties should be included in the output for every task.

Response

To be implemented, but is intended to contain tasks assigned to group members, group pooled tasks (which are by definition unassigned), and completed tasks, all of which will have the following fields associated with each task: taskName, priority, duration, status, percent, dueDate, created, description.

Task

Returns current and historical workflow information for the identified task.  Further details TBD.

Workflow

Returns current and historical workflow information for the identified workflow.  Further details TBD.

If you have any feedback on what I’ve presented so far, as always, please speak up.

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As part of the Alfresco Consulting team, I’ve done some work on web scripts for reporting workflow status, keyed off of custom workflow metadata.  At the AIIM conference a few weeks ago, I was asked multiple times about Alfresco’s ability to expose workflow reports. Last week I came across a post from Kas Thomas who wondered, “Does workflow always have to suck?“, which touched on workflow reporting.  My conclusion after all of this: we need to build workflow status reporting. And I’m going to start on it.

Now there are a lot of ways in which we could build this out.  First, we need to consider the reporting context.  Do we want to report based on:

• the system as a whole (”show me all workflow status in the entire system”)
• web content management use (”show me all workflow status for web project X”)
• user (”show me how user ‘bobsmith’ is involved in workflow”)
• group (”show me how group ‘marketing’ is involved in workflow”)
• asset type (”show me all workflow status pertaining to ‘.jpg’ files”)
• asset (”show me all workflow status related to this particular document”)
• path (”show me all workflow status related to assets in/under this path”)
• workflow (”show me all status related to all instances of this named workflow”)
• workflow task (”show me all status related to all instances of this named workflow task”)
• something else I haven’t thought of yet (please comment here if you have other suggestions)

Since I want to get something going that will be of the most use to the most people, I’m going to start with reporting by user, then by group.  My next consideration will be exactly what to report.  I have not used any other workflow software besides Alfresco, so if you’ve got input on this, I would love to hear it (please comment below).  That said, so far I’m thinking that given a user id, the report will show:

• the number of currently active workflows the user is/may be involved it (i.e. this would be inclusive of pooled tasks assigned to a group that the user is a part of)
• the number of currently active workflow tasks the user has assigned to them

Given a user id and a date range, the report will show:

• the number of completed tasks
• the number of completed workflows
• the average duration of each completed task

Better still, given a user id, date range (Jan 1, 2008 - December 31, 2008), and recurring time period (monthly), the report could show a bar chart or line graph of the aforementioned metrics.  Perhaps you can even add the ability to compare one user to another on those metrics.

A few things are notably missing so far.  Nowhere have I mentioned the ability to key off of custom workflow metadata, or report on custom workflow metadata. Perhaps the former could be addressed via the inclusion of a name/value pair that serves as a filter.  For example, providing {http://www.mycompany.com/model/my-workflow/1.0}/customId=42 could serve to filter out any workflow that does not have that custom metadata set on the workflow’s start task.  Reporting custom workflow metadata probably doesn’t make sense as part of a “by user” oriented report, but probably does make sense as part of a named workflow report.  What do you think?

Hopefully this post will drum up some food for thought, and ideally some feedback on what Alfresco users might want from a workflow reporting perspective.  Please feel free to share your thoughts on the subject by commenting here or participating in the workflow forum at http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewforum.php?f=34.

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When dealing with workflows, a commonly requested feature is the ability to have automated E-Mails sent out from the workflow.  Alfresco documents a way to do this via the AlfrescoJavaScript action, by writing some Javascript code to send out the E-Mail.  While this approach provides great flexibility, it also requires your Javascript skills to be up to par.  Wouldn’t it be great to have a specialized E-Mail action instead that could be configured via XML?  Of course it would.

Here’s a simple example of how such an action could be used:

<action class="org.alfresco.repo.workflow.jbpm.Mailer" config-type="bean">
   <to>alfresco@localhost</to>
   <from>info@alfresco.com</from>
   <subject>Content awaiting review!</subject>
   <text>New changes have been submitted and are awaiting your review!</text>
</action>

This is a bit easier to work with as a workflow author than having to code an E-Mail action being sent via Javascript. It does have some limitations though in this simple form, so let’s enhance it a little further. A few things that might be desirable include:

• Comma and/or semicolon separated E-Mail addresses
• Variable resolution of E-Mail addresses
• Variable resolution of task assignee E-Mail addresses (bpm:assignee)
• Variable resolution of multiple task assignee E-Mail addresses (bpm:assignees)
• Variable resolution of task group assignee E-Mail addresses (bpm:groupAssignee)
• Variable resolution of multiple task group assignee E-Mail addresses (bpm:groupAssignees)
• Variable resolution within the subject and body text

By implementing an Alfresco jBPM action to handle these various requirements, one could ultimately specify a quite dynamic E-Mail action, such as the following:

<action class="org.alfresco.repo.workflow.jbpm.Mailer" config-type="bean">
   <to>bob@example.com, ${bpm_groupAssignees}, ${somewf_somePersonsEmail}, jane@example.com</to>
   <from>info@alfresco.com</from>
   <subject>Content awaiting review!</subject>
   <text>New changes have been submitted and are awaiting your review!</text>
</action>

Further enhancements could include leveraging E-Mail templates already registered with the repository.  To get your hands on an implementation of the E-Mail action described here, see improvement ALFCOM-2555 in Alfresco’s JIRA.  If you have suggestions for how to further improve this simple extension, please comment here!

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As you may know, I have an interest in digital media, particularly regarding digital video, including its production and its use (home, mobile, etc.). I’ve decided to start a blog (or two) and maybe a related podcast on the topic of digital media. Specifically, I want to reach these two audiences:

1. Home entertainment enthusiasts - those people who have a computer of some kind stationed in or near their home entertainment center, dedicated solely for use by the home entertainment center
2. Digital media content producers - those people who capture audio, video, and/or digital images and work with them in order to deliver the appropriate format and size for their intended destination (such as TV, mobile devices, the web, etc.)

I’ve thought about this quite a bit, but I wonder, what do you think?  Here are the issues I am wrestling with:

1. Are these target audiences different enough to warrant two separate blogs, or can one blog serve both audiences with excellence?
2. I really like the “blog family” concept, which I think is essential to establish a brand.  Think about TechCrunch, MobileCrunch, and TalkCrunch as an example of a “blog family”.  With that in mind, what should the blog/blogs/podcast be called?

I’m usually really good at brainstorming, but for some reason, the name question is killing me.  Therefore, as a thank you for relieving my mental block, whoever comes up with the naming scheme I end up using will receive a free copy of Tribes by Seth Godin.  Please comment here with your suggestions, and thanks in advance for your help!

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On November 28th, I followed Alex Barger (AKA @galaxiecruzin) on Twitter. Immediately I received a direct message from him that said:

“Thanks 4 following. Here is a short video introduction: http://www.cruzinthegalaxie.com/sfw/thanks-for-the-follow/”

So I checked out his video, liked the guy and the idea, and asked him how he did it. He told me, so I did it too a few days later. See my welcome video here.

As you can see, I simply introduce myself and tell people what I do, what my interests are, and what I tweet about.  The feedback I received in the week since has been overwhelmingly positive.  In fact, I went back and counted.  I got 50 positive responses via direct message or reply from Twittter, 4 neutral responses, and 2 negative responses out of the 344 people who clicked on the link.  In addition to that, I’ve been invited to lunch by a social media company, invited to write for a recently launched online magazine with several authors, and invited to record 30-60 second videos on various topics for a well known musical artist’s web site.  Here is some of the praise I received (only public responses included here):

steaner: Pretty cool. When @Hobnox started following @br524 we got a DM with a link to a short introduction video http://bit.ly/13yEw

MikeLizun: Nice touch from @br524 thanks followers with a video http://tinyurl.com/6nemcq tells you a little about him, what he does, what he tweets

cwalcott: @br524 I like your twitter welcome video, I think that’s a really good idea

aneel: well now.. @br524 has a nice “welcome” vid for twitter followers. kinda like that.

botchagalupe: Digging the video intro thingy when I follow someone. I need to get one of those… thx @br524

dcw: @br524 just inadvertently gave me a wonderful idea as far as v/blogging goes. Brilliant; utterly brilliant….

MikeyPod: @br524 wow! great idea to do the twitter intro video! nice to meet ya!

ellieeille: Nice idea: @br524 introduces himself to new twitter followers in a 30-second video clip (link in a DM) http://poprl.com/6xg

martin001: @ellieeille i just followed @br524 because i watched his video you linked up.. i think thats a brilliant idea - might just have to imitate

jstorerj: the other day i asked what you thought of auto-DM’s after a follow. most ppl thought it was a bad practice. @br524’s is ok http://is.gd/aip0

DarinRMcClure: @br524 Nice welcome vid.

HeatherLeson: Wow that is a first! Follow someone and get a video introduction. Masterful usage @br524

Today I got a negative response from @lizstrauss, a highly followed and successful blogger, who asked me to ‘please turn off your auto-responder’.  After a private back and forth, Liz directed me to this post about Twitter Spam, which basically says auto responses demonstrate that you don’t “get it”, and that you’re sending unwanted spam to people in this fashion.  I really have to disagree with this view, particularly in light of all the positive feedback I’ve been receiving about this.  Generally, yes, the auto-response is impersonal, and I rarely click on the links to a person’s blog in those messages.  I really do think the approach I’ve taken is distinctly different, significantly more personal, and a hell of a lot more engaging.

So I’m curious now…those who did not respond after having clicked the link in my auto-response message but did not comment one way or another…did they dislike the introduction?  After all, there are 289 people who saw the video who have not weighed in.  Maybe all this positive feedback is really the minority!

Somehow I doubt it though.  The guy who had the idea originally (as far as I can tell) reports success on several levels, and got similarly positive responses.

For those of you seeing it here for the first time, what do you think?  If you followed me on twitter and got a direct message that said, “Thanks for following! I made you a 30 second Twitter Welcome Video - http://poprl.com/6xg .  Thanks again…Brian”, would that make you mad?  What about after you watched the video?

Please comment here, I’d really love to get to the bottom of this.

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