Site Poll dashlet for Alfresco Share

Author: Will Abson

This project defines a custom dashlet allowing polls to be defined within a site, which site users can then vote on, using the dashlet.

Installation

The dashlet is packaged as a single JAR file for easy installation into Alfresco Share.

To install the dashlet, simply drop the site-poll-dashlet-<version>.jar file into the tomcat/shared/lib folder within your Alfresco installation, and restart the application server. You might need to create this folder if it does not already exist.

Building from Source

An Ant build script is provided to build a JAR file containing the custom files, which can then be installed into the tomcat/shared/lib folder of your Alfresco installation.

To build the JAR file, run the following command from the base project directory.

ant dist-jar

The command should build a JAR file named site-poll-dashlet-<version>.jar in the build/dist directory within your project, which you can then copy into the tomcat/shared/lib folder of your Alfresco installation.

Alternatively, you can use the build script to hot deploy the JAR file directly into a local Tomcat instance for testing. You will need to use the hotcopy-tomcat-jar task and set the tomcat.home property in Ant.

ant -Dtomcat.home=C:/Alfresco/tomcat hotcopy-tomcat-jar

After you have deployed the JAR file you will need to restart Tomcat to ensure it picks up the changes.

Usage

1. Log in to Alfresco Share and navigate to a site where you are a Site Manager
2. Navigate to the Data Lists page
3. If you have not done so before, create a new data list of type Poll
4. Create your poll in the list by clicking the New Item button. Make sure you tick the Enabled checkbox and complete all other required fields.
5. Navigate back to the site dashboard and click the Customize Dashboard button to edit the contents of the dashboard. Drag the dashlet into one of the columns from the list of dashlets to add it.
6. Back on the dashboard, click Configure on the Site Poll dashlet and select the poll to display.
7. Click OK to save the configuration and then refresh the page in your browser to make this take effect.
8. The poll should now be displayed in the dashlet. After you have voted on it you will be able to see the current results.

Known Issues

• By default, only members with the Site Contributor role or greater are able to vote in polls that you create. You can however allow Site Consumers to vote by changing the permission on the poll object, using the Repository Browser component in Share or via Alfresco Explorer.

More Information