Technical Tips & Tricks: Forming Relationships Between Documents in Alfresco

When building a deliverable from multiple documents or objects in Alfresco, how can you keep track of the source objects which were used to prepare this deliverable?

For example, let’s say you a preparing a proposal for a potential customer. It may be useful to build a bibliography of documents which contribute to your understanding of the customer’s needs and/or other information which is germane to the proposal preparation. For instance, the proposal could have been developed based on meeting minutes, marketing collateral, a basis of estimate, regulatory constraints, etc., all of which are in the Alfresco repository. The ability to associate these documents to the deliverable could prove to be an advantage to a workflow review of the proposal as well as a future set of references once the contract is awarded.

This is just one example of the need to associate documents, there are many others.

Accomplishing this is fairly straight-forward with the Formtek Peer Association Extension for Alfresco.

Key Features of the Formtek Peer Association Extension

Allows a document or folder to be associated with other documents or folders
Available as an action
Compatible with any document type
Provides an indication that a document has one or more associations; or that a document is associated to one or more documents
Ability to download a document’s associations within a zip file

How it works

1. From the Document Library or Document Details window, select the Manage Associations Action. The Manage Associations Window will appear.

Interact via the Manage Associations Window

2. Selecting “Add Association” will pop up a window allowing you to browse the repository to select folders and/or documents to associate to this document.

3. Once your associations are added the Document Details Window will show the associations.

This document has associations to both a folder and a document

4. Selecting the Manage Associations Action after associations have been added can be used to review the associations from and to the document, and provides the ability to remove one or more associations or to download all associations as a zip file.