Introduction

Alfresco has great support for cron jobs and allows you to do this with few defined beans. One of the common requests is to create cron job that will execute action with some parameters passed to this action.

Alfresco Cron Job

Lets see the code of bean named cronJobDefinition.

<bean id="cronJobDefinition"
 class="org.alfresco.repo.action.scheduled.CronScheduledQueryBasedTemplateActionDefinition">
 <property name="transactionMode">
 <value>ISOLATED_TRANSACTIONS</value>
 </property>
 <property name="searchService">
   <ref bean="SearchService" />
 </property>
 <property name="templateService">
   <ref bean="TemplateService" />
 </property>
 <property name="queryLanguage">
   <value>lucene</value>
 </property>
 <property name="stores">
   <list>
     <value>workspace://SpacesStore</value>
    </list>
 </property>
 <property name="queryTemplate">
   <value> PATH:"/app:company_home"
 </value>
 </property>
 <property name="cronExpression">
   <value>0 0-59 * * * ?</value>
 </property>
 <property name="jobName">
   <value>jobA</value>
 </property>
 <property name="jobGroup">
   <value>jobGroup_ver</value>
 </property>
 <property name="triggerName">
   <value>triggerA_ver</value>
 </property>
 <property name="triggerGroup">
   <value>triggerGroup_ver</value>
 </property>
 <property name="scheduler">
   <ref bean="schedulerFactory" />
 </property>
 <property name="actionService">
   <ref bean="ActionService" />
 </property>
 <property name="templateActionModelFactory">
   <ref bean="templateActionModelFactory" />
 </property>
 <property name="templateActionDefinition">
   <ref bean="cron-job-runner-template" />
 </property>
 <property name="transactionService">
   <ref bean="TransactionService" />
 </property>
 <property name="runAsUser">
   <value>System</value>
 </property>
 </bean>

Few of the important properties are:

• transactionMode, here we can specify how transactions are managed. Possible values are
  • ISOLATED_TRANSACTIONS – for each node the action is run in an isolated transaction. Failures are logged.
  • UNTIL_FIRST_FAILURE – for each node the action is run in a isolated transacgtion. The first failure stops this.
  • ONE_TRANSACTION- the actions for all nodes are run in one transaction. One failure will roll back all;
• queryTemplate, here we specify what nodes are going to be run with specified action, as we know that actions are run on ONE node.
• cronExpression, is quartz expression that will specify when will cron job fire. About format you can read here. In our case job will run every minute(just saying).
• templateActionDefinition, here we specify template that will be called when our job triggers.

Template Action Definition

<bean id="cron-job-runner-template"
 class="org.alfresco.repo.action.scheduled.SimpleTemplateActionDefinition">
 <property name="actionName">
   <value>cron-job-runner</value>
 </property>
 <property name="parameterTemplates">
   <map>
     <entry>
       <key>
         <value>aspect-name</value>
       </key>
         <value>{http://www.alfresco.org/model/content/1.0}versionable</value>
     </entry>
   </map>
 </property>
 

 <property name="templateActionModelFactory">
 <ref bean="templateActionModelFactory" />
 </property>
 <property name="dictionaryService">
 <ref bean="DictionaryService" />
 </property>
 <property name="actionService">
 <ref bean="ActionService" />
 </property>
 <property name="templateService">
 <ref bean="TemplateService" />
 </property>
 </bean>

Key points in specifying template are:

• actionName, here we specify what action will be executed
• parameterTemplates, here we can pass parameters to action named in actionName parameter

Action Definition

Action is defined like any other action using next xml peace of code, parent must be action-executer.

 <bean id="cron-job-runner" class="org.alfresco.demoamp.CustomAction"
     parent="action-executer">
   <property name="nodeService">
    <ref bean="nodeService" />
   </property>
 </bean>

Action implementation is simple and goes like this :

import java.util.List;

import org.alfresco.repo.action.ParameterDefinitionImpl;
import org.alfresco.repo.action.executer.ActionExecuterAbstractBase;
import org.alfresco.service.cmr.action.Action;
import org.alfresco.service.cmr.action.ParameterDefinition;
import org.alfresco.service.cmr.dictionary.DataTypeDefinition;
import org.alfresco.service.cmr.repository.NodeRef;
import org.alfresco.service.cmr.repository.NodeService;
import org.alfresco.service.namespace.QName;

public class CustomAction extends ActionExecuterAbstractBase {


 public static final String NAME = "add-aspect";
 public static final String PARAM_ASPECT_NAME = "aspect-name";
 
 /**
 * the node service
 */
 private NodeService nodeService;

 /**
 * Set the node service
 * 
 * @param nodeService
 * the node service
 */
 public void setNodeService(NodeService nodeService) {
 this.nodeService = nodeService;
 }

 @Override
 protected void executeImpl(Action action, NodeRef actionedUponNodeRef) {
  if (this.nodeService.exists(actionedUponNodeRef) == true) {
    QName aspectQName = (QName) action
    .getParameterValue(PARAM_ASPECT_NAME);
    this.nodeService.addAspect(actionedUponNodeRef, aspectQName, null);
  }
 }


 @Override
 protected void addParameterDefinitions(List<ParameterDefinition> paramList) {
  paramList.add(new ParameterDefinitionImpl(PARAM_ASPECT_NAME,
  DataTypeDefinition.QNAME, true,
  getParamDisplayLabel(PARAM_ASPECT_NAME)));

 }

}

Summary

Working with alfresco cron job is great fun and with ease you can make your job that can send reports, or add missing aspects or anything your action can do.

We hope that this short tutorial was helpful for you.

Prvoslav Savic on Google+

Don't be shellfish...