Alfresco - How to create a custom Admin Console Component

If your extension module needs an Administration interface, you can add a custom Admin Console Component to manage your module. The Admin Console is composed of default administration pages. Each Admin Console page is a simple web script component built from a library of useful functions and macros that are imported into each Admin Console web script.

The custom Admin Console component can be added by implementing a repository web script. In this example we will add a custom component under a new section called “Formtek”. The “General Information” custom page displays the Formtek Root Directory Path and the Formtek Modules installed.

To have the new component listed under the Formtek section we will have to store the web script files in a specific directory path - org/alfresco/enterprise/repository/admin/zformtek.

The web script descriptor file shown below automatically adds this custom component to the Admin Console. In the web script descriptor file the url, family and the authentication tag values are very important. The Admin Console is available only in the Alfresco Enterprise edition and only an Administrator can access it so the url has to begin with /enterprise/admin, the custom component needs to belong to the AdminConsole family and the authentication has to be set to admin.

In the web script controller, we have to inform the Admin Console system which MBean and its properties we want to use in our custom component. In this custom component we are using the ModuleService MBean to get the list of installed modules.

The web script template contains the page layout. For this custom component it loops through the list of installed modules and displays only the Formtek modules. The template uses a number of resource properties that are fetched using the msg function.

The resource properties should be defined in a web script resource file.