Alfresco iOS Mobile Application Details and Design

Mike Hatfield - Senior Engineer, Mobile TeamMarc Dubresson - Director of Mobile Products

Who are we?

Marc Dubresson • Mobile Product Management

Gavin Cornwell Mike Hatfield • Alfresco Mobile Development Core Team

Zia • Outsourced Mobile Development Partner• Platinum Alfresco Professional Services & OEM Partner

Agenda

• Today’s News • Architecture Overview • CMIS Refresher • Demo • Technical Walkthrough • Open Source Project • Roadmap • Questions?

Alfresco Mobile 1.1

Architecture Overview

Mostly a CMIS application talking to Alfresco Several features specific to Alfresco

Alfresco

CMIS

REST

CMIS Refresher

CMIS Technical Committee Goals & Scope • Content Management Interoperability Services• Enable applications to target different ECM repositories uniformly• Provide a set of basic services enabling richer ECM applications

and use cases• All for loose coupling of an ECM application on the underlying

repository• Use popular protocol bindings•REST / AtomPub•Web Services / SOAP• v1.1 - JSON (Browser Binding)

Demo

Alfresco Mobile in Action – A Few Features • CMIS: • Login to Alfresco over HTTP or HTTPS• Browse, Search, Display Content and Edit Metadata, Upload Files•Create Folders

• Alfresco• Activities• Like & Unlike•Comment on Documents

• iOS• Local Downloads• “Open In...” support to/from other apps

Design

• Universal binary• Hierarchy of Table Views• Navigation based app for browsing CMIS repositories• Layered on Alfresco specific functionality

Designed for the iPad

• Navigation based app but with iPad-specific view controllers • Split View Controller• Still a universal binary

CMIS AtomPub Binding (XML)

Alfresco REST API (JSON)

App Launch / Sites / Browse

• iOS: Read user settings• CMIS: Retrieve AtomPub Service Document• Alfresco: Request Sites List• CMIS: Request folder children for the Root Collection• CMIS: Navigate into a folder or site

Activities

• Alfresco: Retrieve user’s activity feed

• User taps a document table cell• CMIS: Retrieve Document via

getObjectByID service

• User taps the “info icon” • CMIS: Retrieve Document Metadata

using getTypeDefinition service

Search

Execute a CMIS Query • Full-text search:•SELECT * FROM cmis:document WHERE

CONTAINS(‘keywords’)

• Search by cmis:name:•SELECT * FROM cmis:document WHERE

CONTAINS(‘~cmis:name:’*keywords*’)

Tools for iOS Development

Mac with OS X Snow Leopard or Lion

XCode 4.2 • Integrated Development Environment• Integrated Build System• Debugger• Interface Builder• iOS Simulator

Instruments •Performance and behaviour analysis

Getting Started

Create an iOS developer account (free)

Install the latest version of XCode 4.2 (free) Clone the repository • git clone https://ziadev@bitbucket.org/ziadev/alfresco-mobile.git

Open the Project

Multiple Targets in the Project

Two Targets: Alfresco & Fresh Docs

Build and Run

Select a target and the iOS Simulator to Use

How do I install it on my device?

See iOS Provisioning Portal Resources & How-To Guides

Sign up for a (paid) iOS Developer Program Account

Configure profile: Development certificate, App Id Provision Device (UDID)

Configure & build the App for the device

I Thought This Was A DevCon?

AlfrescoAppDelegate.h

Calling an AtomPub Service

CMISRESTfulRequest

AtomPubXMLAlfresco

Creating an HTTP Request

• Using ASIHTTPRequest build the request • The delegate handles events from that request

Parsing AtomPub XML

Event-Driven XML Parsing (SAX) • Parser sends messages (parsing events) to it’s delegates

(callbacks)

Use NSXMLParser & NSXMLParserDelegate • Recommended by Apple• Native API• Objective-C based implementation

Why not use the Tree-based API (DOM)? • Apple does not provide the API for iOS

NSXMLParser & NSXMLParserDelegate

Setting up NSXMLParser

NSXMLParserDelegate methods

• – parser:didStartElement:namespaceURI:qualifiedName:attributes:

• – parser:didEndElement:namespaceURI:qualifiedName:• – parser:foundCharacters:

Calling Alfresco REST APIs

RESTfulHTTPRequest

JSONAlfresco

JSON data transport

Simpler to consume than XML

Using SBJson • Other libraries available, e.g. TouchJSON, JSONKit• iOS 5.0 supports JSON natively

Parses into NSDictionary and NSArray objects

CMIS 1.1 will contain a Browser Binding

What do I need to know?• Objective-C • cocoadevcentral.com/d/learn_objectivec

• iOS App Programming • developer.apple.com

• Alfresco RESTful API • wiki.alfresco.com

• CMIS AtomPub Binding • wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/CMIS

• Git • gitref.org

Common Design Patterns

Model-View-Controller • A pattern to relate the user interface to an underlying data

model.

Delegation • A patten where an object, the delegator, delegates tasks to an

associated helper object, the delegate.• The delegate is responsible for executing the task for the

delegator.

Target-Action • Target-action is a design pattern in which an object holds the

information necessary to send a message to another object when an event occurs.

API’s and Libraries UsedCocoa Touch Frameworks • The API’s Apple provides to build an iOS application

ASIHTTPRequest • Wrapper around Apple’s CFNetwork API

SBJson • Fast, simple & clean JSON parser and generator

ISO8601 • XML date parsing

Flurry Analytics • Remote logging for app crashes (uncaught exceptions)

Open Source Availability

Hosted on Bitbucket

bit.ly/alf-mobile

Search for “alfresco-mobile” at bitbucket.org

Released under the Mozilla Public License Version 1.1

How Do I Contribute?

Step-by-step example for forking and sending a pull request:

http://bit.ly/pbIDRk (atlassian.com wiki)

ResourcesApple iOS Developer Portal • Sample Code, API Documentation, Design Guides, Developer Videos, etc.!

Books • Beginning iPhone 4 Development (Apress Publishing)• Programming in Objective-C (Sam’s Publishing)

Many Developer Blogs • http://icepla.net

Also: Twitter, StackOverflow

Roadmap

Next version • Alfresco Cloud

• Multiple Repositories

• ...MoreIntegration • Leading productivity apps such as PDF Expert and QuickOffice

AndroidAdditional Alfresco Mobile AppsWhat else? > marc.dubresson@alfresco.com

Q & A