Alfresco Community Edition 7.3 Release Notes

[angelborroy]

Alfresco Content Services 7.3 is a minor software update release with improvements to Alfresco Content Services to accelerate use and development for customer solutions for deployment. With Alfresco Content Services 7.3, Alfresco continues to enable open source communities, customers and partners to deliver a highly reliable Content Store upon which to build applications and solutions.

Alfresco Content Services 7.3 delivers functionality to enable customers and developers to install Alfresco created solutions and to customise the product through integrations, APIs and SDKs.

Additionally, customers can purchase an upgrade from Alfresco Community Edition to Alfresco Content Services 7.3 to enable advanced features and purchase Alfresco applications, connectivity and solutions. To learn more about the differences of Alfresco Community Edition and Alfresco Content Services, we have a datasheet here that highlight the gains of upgrading to Alfresco Content Services.

This release contains enhancements completed for the release of Alfresco Content Services 7.3. In addition, this release contains an updated stack of supported databases, operating systems and platforms providing up to date support. All hot fixes and patches from Alfresco Content Services 7.0.0 onwards are included in this release.

Alfresco’s release readiness testing team have successfully completed their regression and upgrade testing cycles to help give you confidence to upgrade to the release. Alfresco Community Edition 7.3 shares much of its code with Alfresco Content Services which adds significant functionality in the release.

Goals for this Release

The main goal of this release is to enable customers, partners and experimenters to create solutions built on top of Alfresco’s content repository. As Alfresco and Hyland have a continuing commitment to Open Source, we value your feedback on the Hyland Community Hub.

Highlights

• Java 17 support
  • Alfresco Content Services 7.3 now supports running on Java 17, despite Java 11 is also supported. See the Supported Platforms page for more information.
• Angular 14 support
  • Alfresco Content Application 3.1.0 (built on top of ADF 5.1.0) now supports Angular 14.

Use Cases

• Provide new features to allow partners and customers to create solutions.
• Support customers using the Open Source version of our major products and components.
• Support partners doing open source development for customisations for their customers.
• Support customers in open source development.
• Assisting partners and customers to migrate customisations from previous releases to Alfresco Community Edition 7.3.

Please report issues with this Alfresco Community Edition 7.3 using GitHub Issues or by using the discussion tools in the Alfresco Hub for Alfresco Community Edition.

Installation

Alfresco Community Edition 7.3 is available as a distribution zip file for manual installation, or it can be installed using an Ansible playbook (Linux only) for non-containerized environments. It is also available as a set of Docker images that can be deployed in containerized environments using docker-compose or Helm charts (for Kubernetes).

You can find a summary of these options here:

https://www.alfresco.com/products/community/download

Additionally, Alfresco Docker Installer tool provides a customized deployment with Docker Compose.

Upgrading from previous releases

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous releases of Alfresco Community Edition 7.3. There are some steps that should be reviewed and planned before you upgrade. Please take the time to familiarize yourself with the guidance below and plan your upgrade.

Please refer to the detailed Upgrading documentation, including Alfresco Content Services upgrade paths.

In particular, please ensure that the following steps are completed before you start your upgrade process:

• Ensure that you have a functional backup of your Alfresco Repository and your Alfresco Database, before starting the upgrade process
• Download and run the Alfresco Extension Inspector to understand, which customisation or library items need to be reviewed or updated prior to starting
• Review all new and deprecated features included in this release note
• Review and implement the new supported stack options and the minimum versions of modules/extensions required, and update as necessary for the new deployment
• Apply the recommended database optimisation patch for larger implementations (see upgrade documentation for details)

Specific Release Components

Content Repository

New REST API Endpoints:

New (Actions)

• GET /action-parameter-constraints/{parameterConstraintName} - retrieve an action parameter constraint by requested name.

Updated (Actions)

• GET /action-definitions - added field ‘parameterConstraintName’ to action parameter definitions.
• GET /action-definitions/{actionDefinitionId} - added field ‘parameterConstraintName’ to action parameter definitions.

Updated (Discovery)

• GET /discovery - added field ‘isCustomEmbeddedWorkflowEnabled’ to license info.

REST API Explorer

REST API Explorer is integrated into alfresco-repository-Community Docker image. It is accessible via the link provided in the /alfresco page either via using /api-explorer context on alfrescoServerPath (alfrescoScheme://alfrescoHost:alfrescoPort).

To navigate the details of the new REST API endpoints GitHub - rest-api-explorer.

Alfresco Share

The latest release of Share is 7.3.0.1

Search Services

Alfresco Search Services for Community Edition is 2.0.5.1. Solr 6.6 is the underlying search engine.

When relying on Search Services, usage of unauthenticated plain HTTP communication between ACS 7.3 and Solr is not supported. You need to switch to SECRET or mTLS communication method, if using HTTP on previous versions.

Alfresco Governance Services

AGS 7.3.0 is the latest release and is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.3.

Alfresco Mobile

Alfresco Mobile Workspace is 1.5 and is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.3.

SDK

The latest release of the Alfresco in-process SDK is SDK 4.5, which is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.3.

The latest release of the Alfresco out-of-process Event SDK is SDK 5.2, which is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.3 and the new SDK Event Gateway.

Alfresco Extension Inspector

This optional utility helps partners and customers better understand the customisations in their existing deployments. The Alfresco Extension Inspector is a utility for AMP inspection for Alfresco Community Edition and Alfresco Content Services 5.2.7, 6.2.2, 7.x releases. The inspector is recommended for use before installing new versions of our product to help expose any issues that might impeded success.

The alfresco-extension-inspector is a tool that scans and validates an Alfresco extension (amp or jar) against an alfresco.war file. The tool parses an extension and generates a report on possible overrides, discouraged usage of nonpublic API, Alfresco's 3rd-party libraries and incompatible libraries.

To download Alfresco Extension Inspector from Nexus click here or from GitHub.

Alfresco Local Transform

The latest release of the Alfresco Local Transform is 3.0.0, which is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.3.

Alfresco Content Application

The latest release of Alfresco Content Application is 3.1.0 which is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.3.

Documentation

The documentation has been refreshed for this release:

https://docs.alfresco.com/content-services/community/

Localization

The Content Repository supports the following languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Danish, Swedish, Finnish and Simplified Chinese.

Share supports the following languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese.

Alfresco Content Application supports the following languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Norwegian (Bokmål), Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Danish, Swedish, Finnish and Simplified Chinese.

Feature Removals

• No removal of 3rd party libraries

Contents

• Alfresco Content Repository 7.3.0 (SCM tag)

• Alfresco Share 7.3.0 (SCM tag)

• Alfresco Content Application 3.1.0 (SCM_tag)

• Alfresco Local Transform 3.0.0 (SCM tag)

• Alfresco Search Services 2.0.3 (SCM tag)

• Google Docs 3.3.0 (SCM tag)

• AOS Module 1.5.0 (SCM tag)

Images are available on Docker Hub

• alfresco/alfresco-content-repository-community
• alfresco/alfresco-transform-core-aio
• alfresco/alfresco-share
• alfresco/alfresco-search-services
• alfresco/alfresco-activemq
• alfresco/alfresco-content-app

The source code for the packaging project that is used to create and run Docker images and build the distribution zip can be found here.

3rd Party Components installed in the Docker Containers

• CentOS 8.6 x64
• OpenJDK 17.0.4.1
• Apache Tomcat 9.0.62
• Jetty 9.3.30.v20211001
• PostgreSQL 14.4
• Apache ActiveMQ 5.17.1

Library Upgrades

A number of underlying libraries have been updated in both the Repository and Share.

• Spring has been upgraded to 5.3.23 (from 5.3.15 in ACS 7.2)
• Camel has been upgraded to 3.18.2 (from 3.15.0 in ACS 7.2)
• Jakarta remains at 2.3.3

If you’re upgrading from ACS 6.x to ACS 7.x, check out the Migration Guide to find out if your integrations need refactoring actions.

Issues Addressed

The MNT (Maintenance) issues addressed in the release are below:

• MNT-23241 - Search Services is adding duplicated HTTP Request Header when using SECRET communication mode with Repository
• MNT-23190- Queries to find users don't return correct results
• MNT-22203 - [Security] Information leakage in Share, ACS version is displayed in error messages
• MNT-23118 - 255 character limit in JavaScript API for creating a new node
• MNT-21638 - [Security] RCE vulnerability in workflow scriptTask
• MNT-22233 - Error loading records subcategory with cut off step
• MNT-23195 - Components failing to persist remain in cache when configuring a user's dashboard in Share
• MNT-21901 - Internal Error when adding My Discussion dashlet to share site-Concurrency issue
• MNT-23177 - LDAP account locked because each time Alfresco is restarted, it still tries 4 incorrect logins
• MNT-23176 - PropCleaner V2 fails with error
• MNT-23087 - Export of records search failing based on end user selection
• MNT-23103 - Downloading a document replaces filename having space with + character
• MNT-23074 - Alfresco ACS v7.0.1 - Must fix the issues reported as a result of AppScan so customer can issue re-AppScan - Share Session ID not updated after login
• MNT-22083 - Send email To field (recipients) cleared when one of the recipients are deleted -"Person x does not exist" when edit rule
• MNT-22344 - Incorrect “Date and Time” in the properties EXIF section for a photo being stored in Share
• MNT-23104 - PaaS - Direct access URL REST API call returning 50
• MNT-22982 - Alfresco ticket being reused by another user.
• MNT-22979 - In ACS v7.2, there are two versions of commons-dbcp library shipped
• MNT-22085 - Change default email domain
• MNT-23043 - Performance Issues with CleanAlfPropTables v2

Known Issues

• None

Additional resources for Alfresco 7.3

• Using Alfresco Embedded Activiti Engine with Alfresco 7.3
• Upgrading to Alfresco Transform Core 3.0.0 with Alfresco 7.3
• Alfresco Docker Images AARCH64/ARM64 support in Alfresco 7.3
• Alfresco Docker Extension for Alfresco 7.3
• Online Editing Tools for Alfresco 7.3
• Easiest way to install Alfresco 7.3 using Docker Compose