Having issues uploading to Alfresco Share using its Adobe flash up-loader?

As weird as this sounds, try updating your installation of Internet Explorer.

Even if your not using Internet Explorer, lets be honest who still is! 🙂

This has solved issues that we’ve been having, machines which still had IE6 on them, when updated to IE8 the up-loader would work in both Firefox and Chrome.

It also allowed us to use Primefaces 2.2 fileUpload on the machine it wasn’t working on, after updating IE.

Getting Alfresco Share to correctly display document previews can be a royal pain, hopefully the following information will help you get yours to work.

The headless Open Office packages which come with RHEL5 don’t work correctly, if your using the same O/S
remove the existing installed packages & install the whole program on your server from www.openoffice.org
– This was a big part of our issues.
There are no reasons behind this, just a little bit of information here

Next install the required packages :
pdf2swf
convert

Edit:
vi /usr/local/glassfish3.1/glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco-global.properties

Change so it reads:
#
# External locations
#-------------
ooo.exe=/opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice.bin
ooo.enabled=true
img.root=/usr/local/bin
img.exe=/usr/local/bin/convert
swf.exe=/usr/local/bin/pdf2swf

Now check to see if these files that you’ve just installed in ‘/usr/local/bin’ are running correctly, we were having issues, see below:
[root@server bin]# /usr/local/bin/pdf2swf
./pdf2swf: error while loading shared libraries: libjpeg.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This was because the library wasn’t been located, so we deleted/recreated any links to the missing files in both the below locations (just to make sure, as wasnt sure where each program was looking for its required library)

[root@server /]# find ./ -name libjpeg.so.7
./usr/local/lib/libjpeg.so.7
./usr/lib/libjpeg.so.7

‘/usr/lib’
libjpeg.so.7 -> /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.so.7

‘/usr/local/lib’
libjpeg.so.7 -> libjpeg.so.7.0.0

And ‘just like that’ it was working, make sure you also check where ‘convert’ is working.
It took us hours to figure out what was going wrong, so I hope this shines some light on your dark day.

pdf2swf is required for Alfresco global setting. We need to install swftools.

error message when try to install swftools:

./configure

. . .

freetype/config/ ftheader.h: No such file or directory

. . .

Freetype has been install at /usr/local/include/, ftheader.h is located in /usr/local/include/freetype2/freetype/config

Solution:

Add a symbolic link

ln -s /usr/local/include/freetype2/freetype     /usr/include/freetype

Want to know how to create your own custom Alfresco Share theme ?

Follow this guide:

Copy an existing themes folder & files, such as /Share/themes/greenTheme to /Share/themes/YOUR_THEME

Copy /share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/site-data/themes/default.xml to /share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/site-data/themes/YOUR_THEME.xml

Edit YOUR_THEME.xml




Change where it mentions ‘Default Blue’ to a title of your choosing, change ‘theme.default‘ to ‘theme.YOUR_THEME‘.

Edit /YOUR_THEME/presentation.css

Change all occurrences of ‘greenTheme‘ :
.yui-skin-greenTheme
for
.yui-skin-YOUR_THEME

Edit /YOUR_THEME/yui/assets/skin.css

Change all occurrences of ‘greenTheme‘ :
.yui-skin-greenTheme
for
.yui-skin-YOUR_THEME

The above 2 steps can be easily done using a find and replace function in any text editor.

Now select your new theme within Share under the Admin Console.

Now edit the .css files and images to your hearts content, refreshing the browser to see your changes.

Lovely!

Need to know how to get LDAP working with your Alfresco installation?

Confused by all of what you’ve read on forums and wikis?

Then follow this guide :

1. Edit /YOUR_Glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco-global.properties, let alfresco use LDAP authentication chain:

Before : authentication.chain=alfrescoNtlm1:alfrescoNtlm

After : authentication.chain=alfrescoNtlm1:alfrescoNtlm,ldap1:ldap

2. Create folder /YOUR_Glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/Authentication/ldap/ldap1

3. Copy file /YOUR_Glassfish/domains/domain1/applications/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/subsystems/Authentication/common-ldap-context.xml to /YOUR_Glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco/extension/subsystems/Authentication/ldap/common-ldap-context.xml

4. Copy the two files (ldap-authentication.properties, ldap-authentication-context.xml) in /YOUR_Glassfish/domains/domain1/applications/alfresco/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/subsystems/Authentication/ldap/ to /YOUR_Glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco/subsystems/Authentication/ldap/ldap1/

5. Edit /YOUR_Glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco/subsystems/Authentication/ldap/ldap1/ldap-authentication.properties for ldap setting:

ldap-authentication.properties

# This flag enables use of this LDAP subsystem for authentication. It may be
# that this subsytem should only be used for synchronization, in which case
# this flag should be set to false.
ldap.authentication.active=true

# The default home folder provider to use for people created via LDAP import,depend on your LDAP server
ldap.synchronization.userOrganizationalIdAttributeName=company

6. Restart glassfish. Alfresco Explorer and Share should now work with your LDAP server.

1 Get alfresco war files for deployment in existing application servers package file  alfresco-community-war-3.2r2.tar.gz from http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Community_Edition_file_list_32r2

2. MySql setting

mysql>create database alfresco;

mysql>grant all privileges on alfresco.* to ‘YOUR_ALFRESCO_USERNAME’@’%’ identified by ‘YOUR_ALFRESCO_PASSWORD’;

mysql>grant all privileges on alfresco.* to ‘YOUR_ALFRESCO_USERNAME’@’localhost’ identified by ‘YOUR_ALFRESCO_PASSWORD’;

3. Create alfresco libray folder on glassfish

mkdir /usr/lcoal/glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco

4.Unpacke alfresco-community-war-3.2r2.tar.gz

tar vzxf alfresco-community-war-3.2r2.tar.gz

5. From the directory in which you unpacked the Alfresco bundle, copy the entire contents of the extensions directory to the glassfish domain library /usr/lcoal/glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco

cp -rf extensions/*  /usr/lcoal/glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco

6. Create alfresco documents and index folder

mkdir /usr/local/alfresco

7. Modify alfresco config files for glassfish (/usr/local/glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco/extension)so alfresco can find database and index folder created before

two files should be edited

custom-repository.properties

custom-hibernate-dialog.properties

cd /usr/local/glassfish/domains/domain1/lib/classes/alfresco/extension
vi custom-repository.properties

Set alfresco folder
dir.root = /usr/local/alfresco

Set dababase username and password

db.username=YOUR_ALFRESCO_USERNAME
db.password=YOUR_ALFRESCO_PASSWORD

Comment out the lines for derby and uncomment the lines for MySQL

#db.driver=org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver
#db.url=jdbc:derby:data/derby_data/alfrescocreate=true
…
…
db.driver=org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver
db.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/alfresco

In custom-hibernate-dialog.properties, comment out the line for Derby and uncomment the line for MySQL

8 The Alfresco war file has a WEB-INF/web.xml deployment descriptor that doesn’t comply with the DTD, you need to replace this file and add a Glassfish specific deployment descriptor that will allow Alfresco to use MyFaces instead of JSF.

Get these two files from http://blogs.sun.com/mandy/resource/web.xml, http://blogs.sun.com/mandy/resource/sun-web.xml

Change to the unpacked directory created from alfresco-community-war-3.2r2.tar.gz, create a new directory named WEB-INF and copy the above two files into it. Now update the alfresco.war file using the Java jar command

jar -uvf alfresco.war WEB-INF/*.xml

The alfresco.war should be edited.

9 Increase glassfish memory heap setting
Log in as administrator of glassfish from http://glassfishHost:4848/
Application Server->JVM Settings->JVM Options
Change -Xmx256m to -Xmx512m or more.

10 Deploy the new war file to glassfish.
Log in as administrator of glassshfish from http://glassfishHost:4848/ and deploy alfresco.war.
After a few minutes, alfreso can be visited by hppp://glassfishHost:8080/alfresco

Useful links:
http://blogs.sun.com/mandy/entry/alfresco_on_glassfish_revisited