Realization of an ERD in Alfresco Model Manager

[kwiesinger]

Hi,

I currently have an Entity Relationship Diagram which I want to realize in my Model Manager.

I created the Model and added my tables but I don't know how to implement my connections between the tables (Foreign-keys). I tried associations already but I'm not sure about how or if I can connect my tables the right way.

Can anyone explain to me how to implement Foreign-keys via xml? 

Alfresco Community Edition is version 5.2 for Linux.

Thanks for your help.

[kintu_barot]

You have mentioned Model Manager, so you must be talking about the content model.

Content Model in Alfresco is to bind the set of metadata to content(document or folder).

However, you can build an association between different contents within Alfresco.

But it is difficult to understand what exactly you want to do by creating tables.

Which kind of tables?

Can you please explain a bit more about this?

Regards,

Kintu

ContCentric

[kwiesinger]

Luckily I found a solution for my problem, thanks for your help.

Regards,

Katharina

[abhinavmishra14]

Are you trying to map a table and its columns with content model ?

[lcolorado · Accepted solution]

In my experience, the document content model in Alfresco does not adapt well to the relational database paradigms. Although you may adapt most of the relational DB concepts, Alfresco is not really designed with that purpose in mind. After completing your content model using ERD and RDB concepts, you will probably realize that performing some relational queries can be difficult or impossible, and the performance of some queries can be very poor. 

I don't have a methodology of my own, but I have found that you may benefit from abandoning, at least temporarily, your relational DB experience, and trying to understand and embrace Alfresco's model. 

You may feel uncomfortable abandoning the RDB paradigms, but the Alfresco content model has interesting features that a RDB doesn't have. The content model is conceptually closer to Object Oriented Programming, Aspect Oriented Programming, and hierarchical databases.