EDocman integration

Hi there,
I'm tasked with producing a site using Joomla! and have purchased the EDocman plugin in order to leverage the PDF Indexing and ACL restricting qualities with regard to files.
The other major component of the site will be using Flexicontent to generate content "sections" (items) which will be ordered together in a category and allow the owners to create "pages" (categories) with several mixed content views.

The issue I'm discovering is that EDocman uses it's own categories system and therefore I cannot create a link to an EDocman category as a flexicontent field to be used in a type.

I searched both forums but could not find anyone having asked a similar question before, which surprised me a little considering the popularity and years of development behind both components.

What works would be to create a module containing the desired EDocman category, then link to it in a flexicontent field, but then the problem is that a new module would have to be automatically created with a plugin, when an EDocman category is created. This also means cluttering up the system with a bunch of modules that are only used in one particular place and probably not the intended function of modules at all really.

So what appears to be the most straightforward idea so far is to create a new custom field plugin for flexicontent, which will allow me to select from the list of current EDocman categories. This field can then be added to a type, and the item can be ordered using the same method as the rest of the flexicontent items.

Before I start on that, I'm just wondering if there are any other suggestions, or ways to link EDocman categories to standard Joomla! categories directly in a 1:1 or many:many mapping? Failing that, if by some miracle someone else has needed this and created a flexicontent or EDocman plugin to integrate the two components I'd love to take a look!

Thanks for the great software!

Hello

if you use the FLEXIcontent file field, and assign it to some content types
- then you have the ACL that comes with FLEXIcontent items / categories (we have made some ACL fixes in v3.0.15-dev)

then we are in the process of adding PDF indexing into our search index

to test the updated file field of v3.0.15 (we will examine adding PDF indexing next days, i ll reply here next days if this will be in v3.0.15 or not):

You can test in testing or localhost web-site:
github.com/FLEXIcontent/flexicontent-cck/tree/3.0.x-stable

click "Download or Clone" / Download ZIP
and install into a TESTING web-site via "Joomla extension manager"

Thanks for the reply, if the PDF indexing were to make it in, that would certainly make life a lot easier!
I'll keep watching to see if it makes it.

In the meantime, due to the project needing to be functional as soon as possble, and owing to the possibility that the indexing update might not see release, I think I'll start writing a field plugin for flexi to integrate the EDocman 'tags' rather than the categories.

Looking forward to seeing if the indexing happens though, would also make search a lot easier to deal with!
Thanks

Hello

you are the 3rd person within 20 days, to have a question that is about or related to PDF Indexing

please continue your plans, will see withing week if this will be added in short-term

I think I'll start writing a field plugin for flexi to integrate the EDocman 'tags'

if you do write a plugin, then you may ask question about it

First please read this:
www.flexicontent.org/documentation/faq/7...-new-field-type.html

think you can execute sql request in lot of flexicontent field in order to select thing in EDocman
but a plugin is great for perfect integration

Hello
you are the 3rd person within 20 days, to have a question that is about or related to PDF Indexing

please continue your plans, will see withing week if this will be added in short-term

I think I'll start writing a field plugin for flexi to integrate the EDocman 'tags'

if you do write a plugin, then you may ask question about it

First please read this:
www.flexicontent.org/documentation/faq/7...-new-field-type.html

think you can execute sql request in lot of flexicontent field in order to select thing in EDocman
but a plugin is great for perfect integration

Fantastic! Thank you both, I'm already using the guide to replicate the behaviour of the 'selectmultiple' flexicontent field, building the SQL statement like it is done in the backend, for tags. Through experimenting, I have noticed that the edocman tagging isn't as user friendly as it could be (no existing tags suggestion etc), so I'm looking at doing categories too.

Just a quick sanity check as I'm getting used to 'doing things the Joomla! way', once I have selected tags or categories, I need to override the front end display of the plugin, to call edocman, either via a module or plugin, passing it the parameters, is that right?
Thanks!

Hello

the display layout of every field is inside:

plugins/flexicontent_fields/selectedoc/tmpl/value_default.php
plugins/flexicontent_fields/selectedoc/tmpl/value_*.php

if you have duplicated 'selectmultiple' field that is already using layouts then you are fine, and you can go ahead and change the LOOP that prints the values inside the above mention file (value_default.php)

- also there should not be limitations, related to duplicating fields:
select, selectmultiple
radio, radioimage
checkbox, checkboximage

it should work
selectmultiple

Thank you both very much for all your help with this so far!
I managed to set up the EDocman integration as mentioned, via duplicating the selectmultiple field and customising it to pull data from EDocman category entries. I created a placeholder module based on a standard EDocman "show items in a category" module which is now able to retrieve documents from multiple categories (mod_edocman_filtered). In the front end, the flexi item retrieves the desired category ids from its parameters, then loads the custom module with them passed in as an argument. This has all worked perfectly so far except I see in the debugger that I seem to be loading the EDocman module twice... Not quite sure how or why this is happening.

In fact I only noticed it because another module I'm loading via the loadmodule field (a twitter feed) is being called twice and showed two com_ajax xhr requests to the module I had written. The module only display once though, like the EDocman module, so I supposed the content was being sent to the output buffer for some reason, then later destroyed instead of flushed to output. ob_end_flush'ing, echoing test parameteres and ob_start'ing again within my module code shows that this does in fact appear to be the case.

Anyway, I need the module to only be called once and don't really have an idea why flexi appears to be calling it multiple times when other fields are normally. I thought it might be because of the module set up in Joomla!, but from the log below it seems it is all happening within the flexi component.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks again!

I've attached the debugger output because for some reason, I can't paste the code below, says I have too many links in my message... I don't have any links in the message!

Hello

e.g. if you are in item view and you try to use the load module field in the item view

and then try to use it in the universal content view then it will be called twice

Thanks! but, hmmm, I'm not quite sure what you mean?
I'm not using the universal content module anywhere (It was published but not assigned to any pages. I unpublished it, cleared all caches and the result is the same).

My structure is a little odd though, there will be no "item" pages for this site, just "category" views which include different 'blocks' of items together (nicely re-orderable and easier for the client to control), like a blog concept I guess, but a page would be made of many different types of items.
So this is all happening from a category view, where I have a new template that immitates some of the behaviour of the default category_items_html5.php file.

That is interesting though, when I created a new menu entry just to show a single flexi item, went to my edocman filter module and assigned it to that page, then I correctly get only one call to the module.

So I guess the issue is in the category display / my implementation of the category.php file in my templates... I'll have another look.