Congratulations on acquiring your new Nuxeo platform, a feature-rich and highly-customizable place to manage all of your enterprise content. Let’s take a brief tour of your default Nuxeo platform, including accessing your platform, changing your password, and familiarizing yourself with the default layout.

By now, you should be holding the credentials to access your new Nuxeo platform and account, including a link or URL to the platform, username, and password. If not, we suggest contacting your system administrator in order to obtain this information. If you happen to be the system administrator or owner, the default username and password is ’Administrator’, as detailed in the Nuxeo documentation center found on Nuxeo’s website.

When you initially receive your credentials, the first task is to access the platform by clicking on the link provided to you by your system administrator, or going there directly by copying the URL into your web browser bar. Again, check with your system administrator for details. If all goes well, you will be seeing the Nuxeo Platform login page (Figure 1).

Once on the login page, enter the username and password provided to you, while paying close attention to capitalization. This should get you into the Platform.  Before you begin exploring, we recommend changing your password from the one that was provided for you. To do this, use the sidebar to the left, containing a list of options starting with ‘Dashboard’. Select ‘Profile’ (Figure 2).

Your profile should contain information regarding your account, such as username, first name, last name, company, and email address. In the upper right corner you’ll find a dropdown button labeled ‘Actions’, select this to activate the drop down menu (Figure 3). Then, select ‘Change Password’. Here you can change your current password to a new, more secure, password.

When you’ve confirmed your new password, select ‘Save’, and you’re done (Figure 4). Changing your password is just that easy. We recommend that you do this often to prevent unwanted users accessing your account.

Now that you’ve secured your password, let’s begin our brief tour of your new default Nuxeo Platform. At the very top of the page (Figure 5), you’ll notice the three main spaces to help with managing your enterprise content, ‘HOME’, ‘WORKSPACE’, and ‘SEARCH’.

Every user has a ‘HOME’ space that provides access to various tabs in the left navigation pane, that are user specific. Appropriately named, this is your home on the Nuxeo Platform. Tabs in this space include (Figure 6):

• Dashboard – allows quick access to your content, including favorites, shared content, assigned tasks, your documents, and a timeline of changes to all shared content made by users
• Profile – your profile information, including your username, first name, last name, etc. If you just changed your password by following the steps above, you’ll recognize this tab.
• Workflow – view tasks that have been assigned to you, including their current state
• Alerts – when you subscribe to follow a particular artifact or document, you’ll find your subscription news feed here
• Authorized Applications –  lists any external applications that can access content
• Users & Groups – you can search for users and groups here, and view their existing profile. Searching for ‘ * ’ will provide a list of all users or groups, up to 50.
• Searches – any searches that you performed and saved are listed here for easy access
• Collections – you’ll find all of your collections listed here

Moving on we have your ‘WORKSPACE‘. Here you can easily browse your enterprise content repository, access content, collaborate, follow, share, export, and print (Figure 7). On the left, you’ll find the navigation tree, which is a hierarchical folder structure containing your enterprise content. Depending on your content permissions and how your personal workspace is set up, what you see may differ from what is actually available. This is where you’ll be preforming the bulk of your work. Here you can create and manage new or existing content, and collaborate with fellow users. Like the Nuxeo Platform itself, your personal workspace is rich in features and highly-customizable. Take some time familiarizing yourself with the available features as they are tools to help make managing your enterprise content quick and easy.

Last, we have our ‘SEARCH‘ space. This is a very powerful feature of the Nuxeo Platform. Here you have the ability to search your content using a variety of filters (Figure 8). By default, you will have the filters ‘Faceted Search’, ‘Quick Search’, and ‘NXQL Search’. Other filters can be added by your Nuxeo developer or Platform administrator. For example, an ‘Editing’ search filter, as seen in the provided image. The capabilities of the default content search filters include:

• Faceted Search – provides the ability to search for keywords, metadata, and other precise terms such as, creator, creation date, modification date, tags, location, etc.
• Quick Search – a standard text search, which is the search filter that is available in the top right corner of every page within the platform. This filter is not very precise and is known to return many, possibly irrelevant, results.
• NXQL Search – uses Nuxeo’s database querying language, similar to SQL, to query the contents of the platform

Thus concludes our brief tour of your new default Nuxeo Platform. To summarize, we covered how to access the Platform, how to change your password, and the three main spaces of the Platform. We hope that you found this post useful, and we encourage you to explore and familiarize yourself with your new Nuxeo Platform.

As was mentioned before, the Nuxeo Platform is rich in features to help manage your enterprise content. We recommend reviewing Nuxeo’s User Documentation as you’ll find a lot of useful information, tips, and tricks. Feel free to contact us, and our dedicated team of Nuxeo developers, with any questions on how to leverage the power of Nuxeo to meet your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) needs.

Operations

Automation chains are made up of multiple bits of instructions called ‘operations’. There are many operations that are already defined in Studio that are generally sufficient for most situations. These operations can include fetching a document, creating a task, and logging in as a specific user to name just a few. When creating an automation chain, a user simply needs to add one operation at a time for the task they have in mind. For example, if they want to have a chain where you login as the administrator and create a new document, they would only need to add the corresponding operations for logging in and creating a document.

MVEL Language

The Language is used to create the input values for the operations in an automation chain. MVEL helps determine what metadata should be extracted from specific data types, such as a document file’s title by calling expr:Document[“dc:title”]. With this, you can also set up your own variable names to temporarily hold data, and use them as needed. Here are some basic MVEL scripting features to take note of:

• If you were to type “description” it would have no special interpretation and just literally mean “description”.
• If you were to type “expr:description” the expr means to examine “description” as a scripting expression, and not as a literal one. This allows any scripting interpretation in the expression to return their value.
• If you were to type “expr:Description – @{description}”, and “description” is a variable that holds a string value of “a standard file”, it would return “Description – a standard file”. Having @{} means that it will interpret anything inside the brackets as a variable, which is “a standard file” in this case.
• It’s important to note that if the “expr:” part wasn’t there in the above example, it would just return “Description – @{description}” since it would return as a literal.

There are many more uses of the MVEL language for automation chains, which can be found at the following link: https://doc.nuxeo.com/display/NXDOC/Use+of+MVEL+in+Automation+Chains.

MVEL also has a list of operators to use, which can be found here: http://mvel.codehaus.org/Operators.

If you are curious to see a sample script that uses MVEL, there’s a posted example which creates a random number guessing game: https://github.com/mvel/mvel/blob/master/samples/scripts/randomguess.mvel.

User-Created Operations

Even though the Studio provides a vast amount of useful operations, those aren’t the only ones that are usable. Users are freely able to create their own operations themselves. However for this part, the user should be able to code with Java, and be able to utilize MVEL. This requires the installation of the Eclipse IDE, the Nuxeo SDK, and the Nuxeo IDE for Eclipse. The Nuxeo IDE has a wizard to help set up an operation template to give users a start. From here, the users are free to utilize the Nuxeo SDK library to code a specific operation they need. There’s a tutorial to create your first operation which results in the creation of a random string generator:

http://doc.nuxeo.com/display/NXDOC56/Coding+your+first+operation

To see more information related to creating an operation, refer to here too:

http://doc.nuxeo.com/display/NXDOC/Contributing+an+Operation

These are just the main features associated with automation chains, but I hope this helps anyone get a general idea about the usage of these chains with Nuxeo Studio. Next time, I’d like to elaborate on event handlers, which is the feature responsible for triggering automation chains.

In Nuxeo Platform 7.0, navigate to a document which is ready to be deleted. Then navigate back to the parent document’s Content tab. Check the box next to the name of the document to be deleted. Multiple documents could be selected at this time to be deleted simultaneously. A series of buttons should appear at the bottom of the list of contents once an item is checked. Click the “Delete” button to delete this document (or documents). Then confirm by clicking “OK”.

The parent document can also be deleted. Navigate up a level in the navigation tree, select and delete the parent as well.
Once these documents are deleted, they will no longer appear in the Content tab of the parent document. They will no longer appear on the left navigation tree, either. In order to manage the deleted documents, navigate to the parent of the document that was deleted. In this case, that parent is the Granite Horizon Workspace. Then click the “Manage” tab, and then click the “Trash” subtab.

The action button that is available is “Empty trash”. Select the checkbox next to the parent document (in this case, Granite Horizon Folder) and the options “Permanent delete” and “Restore” appear. Click “Restore” to restore the parent document (Granite Horizon Folder) and all of its subitems. Or, click “Permanent delete” to permanently delete the parent document and all of its subitems. Note that the original child document(s) that were deleted are not listed. Click on the parent document (Granite Horizon Folder) to view the deleted subitems. If the subitems are restored, the parent will be restored as well.
Note that the location where the deleted documents are accessible is the immediate parent document’s Manage/Trash location. In this example, the Granite Horizon Workspace contains the Granite Horizon Folder in the trash. However, the Granite Horizon Workspace’s parent, Workspaces, has nothing in the trash. This may be inconvenient, as it might mean navigating through many documents to find a deleted document. One way around this is to implement a “Domain trash” or a “Workspace trash” at a high level using Nuxeo Studio. This could contain all the deleted documents for that domain and/or workspace. One simple solution to this is to create a content view that shows deleted documents where the path “STARTSWITH” the current document path. The Query filter would look like this:

ecm:mixinType != 'HiddenInNavigation' AND ecm:isCheckedInVersion = 0 AND ecm:currentLifeCycleState = 'deleted' and ecm:path STARTSWITH ?

and the Query parameter is

#{currentDocument.path}

In order to make this behave like the default Trash tab, add a couple user actions called “Restore” and “Permanent delete”. These can be added directly to the Content View by clicking on “Results” -> Enable additional actions -> Create a new action.
Then add this content view to a Tab on the document desired. Enhance this by adding a search filter.
Out of the box, Nuxeo allows users to delete documents, delete parent documents, restore subtrees and permanently delete subtrees and individual documents. With some customization, some high-level management of deleted documents can be added. Worth noting is that Nuxeo’s delete feature can be controlled by ACLs. In addition, a document’s versions can be deleted using the History -> Archived versions tab. This can also be managed by ACLs.
Any questions or comments? Please chime in!