zope & document management systems
Hello all, Some people at my university have developed a free, LGPL'ed, modular Document Management System. About a year ago, because of some other project, they were so disgusted by the licensing scheme of Documentum that they decided they would try and create a free alternative. After a few months of work by several people, it's starting to look very good, and they are thinking about doing a first release within the next few months. I am thinking about writing a Zope plugin/extension for this Document Management System (excuse my terminology, I'm new to Zope,) that would enable its contents to be accessed/searched through uniformly with other content, using Zope's generic framework. But as I'm rather new to Zope, it's difficult to see what would be the most natural way of accomplishing this. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Specifically, the following would be important features: -Users can upload documents and provide metadata which are subsequently copied into the DMS. -The metadata and document contents are indexed in the generic way, I believe it is called a ZCatalog :-) I see that a product called 'ExternalFile' provides an abstraction for accessing files external to Zope. Would it be possible to enhance this product for my purposes? Or would it be more natural to use some other product as a starting point? As a final question, does anyone know of an earlier attempt at creating something similar, but for another DMS? Any help in this is greatly appreciated. Thanks, -- Mark Dufour. 'I accidentally dropped "Mastering Regular Expressions" on my foot, and immediately understood how to express "!@#$%^?&!"'
Hi mark, You may wish to take a look at Case Duncan's Document Library product at http://www.zope.org/Members/Kaivo/DocumentLibrary . It does not plug in to Documentum, but it provides the features you've named. I'm sure Casey would appreciate it if you took up the cause of extending it as well. ;-) HTH, - C On Sat, 2002-10-26 at 12:56, mark dufour wrote:
Hello all,
Some people at my university have developed a free, LGPL'ed, modular Document Management System. About a year ago, because of some other project, they were so disgusted by the licensing scheme of Documentum that they decided they would try and create a free alternative. After a few months of work by several people, it's starting to look very good, and they are thinking about doing a first release within the next few months.
I am thinking about writing a Zope plugin/extension for this Document Management System (excuse my terminology, I'm new to Zope,) that would enable its contents to be accessed/searched through uniformly with other content, using Zope's generic framework. But as I'm rather new to Zope, it's difficult to see what would be the most natural way of accomplishing this. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Specifically, the following would be important features:
-Users can upload documents and provide metadata which are subsequently copied into the DMS. -The metadata and document contents are indexed in the generic way, I believe it is called a ZCatalog :-)
I see that a product called 'ExternalFile' provides an abstraction for accessing files external to Zope. Would it be possible to enhance this product for my purposes? Or would it be more natural to use some other product as a starting point? As a final question, does anyone know of an earlier attempt at creating something similar, but for another DMS?
Any help in this is greatly appreciated. Thanks,
-- Mark Dufour.
'I accidentally dropped "Mastering Regular Expressions" on my foot, and immediately understood how to express "!@#$%^?&!"'
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On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 02:58:19PM -0400, Chris McDonough wrote:
Hi mark,
You may wish to take a look at Case Duncan's Document Library product at http://www.zope.org/Members/Kaivo/DocumentLibrary . It does not plug in to Documentum, but it provides the features you've named. I'm sure Casey would appreciate it if you took up the cause of extending it as well. ;-)
HTH,
thanks, this certainly looks very interesting! especially the part where it indexes .doc files and such :-)) this product might just be 90% of what I need.. ! I will take a good look at it tonight.. thanks for your reply! this is very helpful :-)) -- Mark Dufour. 'I accidentally dropped "Mastering Regular Expressions" on my foot, and immediately understood how to express "!@#$%^?&!"'
On Sun, 27 Oct 2002, mark dufour wrote:
You may wish to take a look at Case Duncan's Document Library product at http://www.zope.org/Members/Kaivo/DocumentLibrary . It does not plug in to Documentum, but it provides the features you've named. I'm sure Casey would appreciate it if you took up the cause of extending it as well. ;-)
HTH,
thanks, this certainly looks very interesting! especially the part where it indexes .doc files and such :-)) this product might just be 90% of what I need.. ! I will take a good look at it tonight..
Because it also seems to fit some of my needs I just try to build a Debian package from it to get it cleanly included into my system. I've got the package builded and do some testing now. The first thing which I observed that there is no kind of "Framework" I would like to see, which has links to "submit" or "review" documents. If I view the intsance of my newly created I just see a search page. But there is nothing to search in the first run ... Just looking through ZMI I found the document_submit method which seemed to perfect to submit new files. But a new hurdle cames up: The list of the (required!) Type field is empty - so I was not able to upload a new document. Trying to get behind I browsed the source of the document_submit method and found out that I might be successfull if I ship a type parameter in the URL. Thus I called .../document_submit?type=text which did not filled in the selection list - but at least enabled me to upload a file. Anyway this is a quite dirty trick and for normal users inacceptable. But now it commes to the review. After uploading my first document I've got: Your document "export.txt" was submitted sucessfully. Your document will be reviewed and will become available in the library when it is approved. Now I'm giving up and try to ask here because I think I must do something wrong here. Is there any "Getting Started with Document Library" which would help me (and the users of the future Debian package) to get the thing up and running? Kind regards Andreas.
Andreas Tille wrote:
On Sun, 27 Oct 2002, mark dufour wrote:
You may wish to take a look at Case Duncan's Document Library product at http://www.zope.org/Members/Kaivo/DocumentLibrary . It does not plug in to Documentum, but it provides the features you've named. I'm sure Casey would appreciate it if you took up the cause of extending it as well. ;-)
HTH,
thanks, this certainly looks very interesting! especially the part where it indexes .doc files and such :-)) this product might just be 90% of what I need.. ! I will take a good look at it tonight..
[stuff deleted]
Now I'm giving up and try to ask here because I think I must do something wrong here. Is there any "Getting Started with Document Library" which would help me (and the users of the future Debian package) to get the thing up and running?
Kind regards
Andreas.
There's a README.txt file that comes with the DocumentLibrary product that will answer some of these questions. Things to look at: Do you have permission to submit documents, review documents, and submit documents without review? Look at the product in the ZMI. Take a look at the Security tab in the ZMI. You'll see that the Document Library instance has a property called document_types that will let you define 'types' that show in the dropdown. The Document Library does work out of the box, but you may still want to define properties and permissions to suite your own needs. Mark
participants (4)
-
Andreas Tille -
Chris McDonough -
mark dufour -
Mark Gibson