Inforama

One of the main enhancements of Inforama 1.1 Enterprise Edition is the ability to seamlessly integrate with Alfresco and Jackrabbit document management systems. This use of a powerful document management system by Inforama is a no-brainer as the main function Inforama fulfills is to generate documents. From the first version Inforama has had the ability to store documents in the file system as they are generated but this usually requires further processes to be put into place to actually store the documents in whatever backed systems are in use within organisations.

Alfresco and Jackrabbit both conform to the JSR 170 standard titled Content Repository for Java technology API. This way of addressing document management systems has the benefit that the main integration for systems supporting the standard is written only once allowing minimal configuration of Inforama in order to use the implementing system. That configuration is shown below in the Inforama administration page.

Now whenever documents are generated with the Inforama engine the generated documents are stored in the Repository and indexed with the information that was used as part of the document generation call. The JSR 170 API allows both the Jackrabbit and Alfresco repositories to be queried via the same interfaces. Within Inforama Enterprise the same page can be used to query the repository regardless of which document management system is being used. The query page is shown below.

When a search is carried out the results will be displayed in the query results page as shown below.

Simply click the get link in order to display the stored document in the browser.

Documents stored in Alfresco can also be seen via the Alfresco interface. Logon to Alfresco and navigate to the Home Directory as shown below.

As can be seen in this screen shot there is a separate space for the Inforama Repository. Click the Inforama Repository link in order to browse the contents and click any of the document links to download and view a document.

This is only the beginning of what can be done with Alfresco and Jackrabbit. As Inforama evolves we would like to use this type of document mangement technology to store Inforama projects as resources which can be accessed via Inforama Studio. This would mean that document design users wouldn't necessarily need to worry about importing JDBC drivers and setting up queries as they could all be stored as resources on a server running Inforama Enterprise.