Krutik Jayswal

It was always interesting for me, to know that how the form is getting rendered in alfresco share.As a beginner, developer start with customizing share-config-custom.xml where we are defining the forms for workflows, document types, aspects.Configurations for content type,folder type and workflow forms are the major things which is handled by share form engine.But there are other interesting things as well like validation handler,configurations of set(grouping fields) etc..It will be interesting to know, that when we are defining this in share configuration , how alfresco is using it internally.So let's begin.

There are multiple places from where. form is getting rendered.Few examples will be , Edit properties dialog,Edit Properties Page,Create Document etc..Apart from this, form can be opened by some custom actions as well(by specifying itemid ,itemkind and form id in argument).

This all things will call only one webscript which is responsible for rendering form, that is the webscript Form Component.Let's take a look on each file of this webscript.

form.get.desc.xml

As the name says its the webscript descriptor file.Nothing major to describe.

forms-bootstrap-context.xml
This file is defined under ,common-webframework project,It contains the java bean for injecting webscript.Below is code of it.

Its a normal thing that we get confused between looping when we are using list, hashmap or array in freemarker .As the syntax differ for each things in freemarker. It also happens that when we want to generate JSON from java collection, we need to append comma on each iteration except the last one.Identifying an last iteration is also an issue when we use freemarker. Its not much difficult, its just we are not concentrating on syntax.

   
    

     <#list ArrayOrListOfusers as user>
         <li>${user}
     </#list>
    

   
    

     <#list HashMap as keyItem,valItem>
         <li>${key}=${val}
     </#list>