Authors: Will Abson (Alfresco), Peter Löfgren (Loftux AB)
This add-on project for Alfresco Share provides a number of content viewers to complement the out-of-the box set supplied with Share, plus a dashlet allowing any content item to be displayed on a site dashboard. The add-on was previously known as Media Previews.
Viewers can be configured into the Web Preview component of the Document Details Page. In addition, the add-on supplies a custom dashlet which can be used to display any chosen document or content item on a site dashboard.
The following viewers are supplied in the v2.x add-on for use on Alfresco 4
PdfJs displays documents, presentations and any other file capable of being transformed to PDF in-line in the web browser using the excellent pdf.js viewer, which uses the power of HTML5 to remove Share’s Flash dependency for document viewing.
The viewer supports a number of features not directly supported by the Flash document previewer, such as a sidebar with thumbnail, outline and search views, bookmarking of individual pages of a document, and will remember the page number and zoom level of previous documents that you have viewed.
FLVPlayer and MP3Player display compatible audio and video files respectively, within the web-browser using the open source FLV Player and MP3 Player media players by neolao. Based on the content’s MIME type, the updated component automatically chooses the appropriate previewer to use.
While similar to the Flash players provided by Share out-of-the-box, these implementations allow advanced customization of the player via configuration and if FFmpeg is installed, will fire up a transformation to allow viewing of non-H264/FLV video and non-MP3 audio. The user is informed when conversion is in progress and the screen automatically updates when the content can be viewed.
Embed uses an in-line iFrame to embed the content itself directly inside the web page. It is suitable for use with content types that can be viewed directly within the web browser such as plain text and PDF, with the Chrome or Acrobat plugins installed. Again, this can be used to avoid the use of the Flash previewer for some clients.
Prettify allows formatted code, mark-up and other supported text formats to be displayed in directly in the document and uses the google-code-prettify project to provide an in-line browser-based view with syntax highlighting.
WebODF is an EXPERIMENTAL viewer which uses the AGPL-licensed WebODF project to display ODF content directly in the web browser.
WebODF cannot be distributed with the add-in itself, so in order to use it you must also download the latest JAR file from the supporting share-webodf project and install it in the same way as the main media-viewers JAR file.
This custom dashlet allows a site administrator to pick a content item from the site which will be displayed to all site members on the site dashboard. The dashlet will choose the correct viewer automatically and is able to use the out-of-the-box viewers supplied plus the custom viewers provided by this add-on or other add-ons.
In addition to the Share component extensions the add-on supplies repository extension configuration for defining ‘thumbnailed’ content in PDF, H264/FLV and MP3 formats, a full-size image thumbnail for video files in JPEG format, and a transformer based on FFmpeg for generating the audio and video formats.
