Alfresco Share site's dashlet for document lib

Question

I was wondering whether exists any dashlet which allows you to explore a site's document library. As far as I know doesn't exist such dashlet out of the box, there only exists the "Site Content" dashlet but it is slightly limited.

I have been searching around and "googling" and I found these useful resources that could be useful as a starting point if I had to create my own:

http://ecmarchitect.com/archives/2012/05/08/1592

http://code.google.com/p/fme-alfresco-extensions/wiki/GalleryPlusDashlet2

Do somebody know more dashlets/resources targeting this issue? Any suggestion?

As a temporary solution, I'm also thinking in the possibility of taking advantage of the "Web View" dashlet, by configuring in it such URL that retrieves the documentlist region/component in the documentlibrary page. For example:, share/page/components/documentlibrary/documentlist or share/page/site/{site}/documentlibrary?region=documentlist. Maybe it is crazy or what I'm saying doesn't make any sense, but it is just an idea.

Another idea that have just came to my mind is the option of creating a custom Surf/Share page which includes the component/webscript that implements the explorer of the document library, specifically the documentlist component. Then configure the "Web View" dashlet giving the URL that points to the custom page created. Would it make sense?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There is a document-liberary-display dashlet available in the alfresco add-on list which can be used to show all the documents from document-library on site-dashlet. http://addons.alfresco.com/addons/document-library-display-dashlet

Answer 2

You are going to see a couple of site visualization and navigation dashlets on Alfresco Visualization Tools available on https://github.com/bhagyas/alfresco-visualization-tools. The project is still at it's initial phase, but you will find interesting snippets of code used to retrieve the document library content trees within the dashlets.

The project was presented by me at Alfresco DevCon in Berlin just a week ago to bring interactive navigation and content analytics. If interested, you can find the slides at the lightening talk slides in the DevCon 2012 site at Alfresco.

Cheers! =)

Answer 3

Hi I've done exactly the same, it was not really needed for a Dashlet but for to embed the documentlibrary of a site in an iframe for another site.

So what I did was indeed create a new page template embedded-documentlibrary.

I've copied first the following files and renamed them:

1. site-data/pages/documentlibrary.xml
2. site-data/template-instances/documentlibrary.xml
3. site-webscripts/org/alfresco/documentlibrary.ftl

If you rename file 3 or put it in another folder, you need to check the paths in file 1 & 2.

So to make only the documentlibrary appear instead of everyting I just removed everything in file 3 within the <div id="alf-hd"> tag.

If you remove the tag, the document-tree will also be removed and it gave some javascript errors. This should be fixed in the latest version, but haven't tied that.

So it's extremely easy to create your own page and instead of navigating to site/documentlibrary you just navigate to site/embedded-documentlibrary or your own name you've chosen.

And yes then you'll need to use the web-view Dashlet to show it.

The only thing you need to know is, that the links open within the iframe. So if you use the web-view Dashlet, you need to open the links in a new window. For my situation I needed an iframe, in your case you could also just let the freemarker from your Dashlet render the components needed.