One common task during Share extension development is to find out what web script that is used for a specific functionality in the user interface, such as file upload.
Instead of guessing for a while it is better to load the page that contains the functionality we are working with, and then inspect the JavaScript files that are loaded. Often you can deduct what web script that is used by looking at the names of the JavaScript files, as they are often similar to the web script file names.
Let’s take the file upload as an example, how could we find the web script related to it? Start by navigating to a folder. From the User Dashboard click the Repository menu item in the top level menu. Then click on the Guest Home folder. You should now see the following window:
With Firebug enabled click on the Upload toolbar item. Firebug should now provide the list of script used by the upload page. See the following picture:
In this case I have scrolled down a bit in the script list until I came across JavaScript files called something related to file upload, such as dnd-upload_xxx.js, file-upload_xxx.js, flash-upload_xxx.js, and html-upload_xxx.js.
So if we are using Flash upload then we could start searching the file system for matching web script files. We would search the exploded webapps as follows:
martin@gravitonian:/opt/alfresco501/tomcat$ find . -name "flash-upload*.xml" ./webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/site-webscripts/org/alfresco/components/upload/flash-upload.get.desc.xml
The thinking here is that most of the functionality is using some client side JavaScript that we can use as entry point when searching. And then we can back track to the related Web Script files. Even better, we can search directly for the JavaScript file name and see if any Web Script file refers to it:
martin@gravitonian:/opt/alfresco501/tomcat$ find . -name "*.ftl"|xargs grep "flash-upload.js"
./webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/site-webscripts/org/alfresco/components/upload/flash-upload.get.html.ftl:
<@script type="text/javascript" src="${url.context}/res/components/upload/flash-upload.js" group="upload"/>
So in this case it is quite clear that the Flash Upload functionality is managed by the flash-upload.get Web Script.