Alfresco Community Edition 7.2 Release Notes

[angelborroy]

Alfresco Content Services 7.2 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 7.2, 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 7.2 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 7.2 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 7.2. 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 7.2 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.

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 7.2.

Please report issues with this Alfresco Community Edition 7.2 using GitHub Issues or by using the discussion tools in the Alfresco Hub for Alfresco Community Edition.

Installation

Alfresco Community Edition 7.2 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

ZIP artifacts

Downloadable ZIP artifacts are available in:

• Repository 7.2.1
• Share 7.2.1
• Search 2.0.3
• Transform 2.5.7
• ACA 2.9.0

Upgrading from previous releases

Care should be taken when upgrading from any previous releases of Alfresco Community Edition 7.2. 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)

Note When relying on Search Services, usage of unauthenticated plain HTTP communication between ACS 7.2 and Solr is not supported anymore. In order to use this kind of communication additional steps have to be taken compared to previous releases. You need to switch to SECRET or mTLS communication method, if using HTTP.

Specific Release Components

Content Repository

New REST API Endpoints:

New (Cloud Storage Info)

• GET /nodes/{nodeId}/storage-info/{contentPropName}
• GET /nodes/{nodeId}/versions/{versionId}/storage-info/{contentPropName}
• POST /nodes/{nodeId}/storage-info/{contentPropName}/archive
• POST /nodes/{nodeId}/versions/{versionId}/storage-info/{contentPropName}/archive
• POST /nodes/{nodeId}/storage-info/{contentPropName}/archive-restore
• POST /nodes/{nodeId}/versions/{versionId}/storage-info/{contentPropName}/archive-restore

New (Delete Rendition)

• DELETE /nodes/{nodeId}/renditions/{renditionId}
• DELETE /nodes/{nodeId}/versions/{versionId}/renditions/{renditionId}

Updated (Cloud Storage Info)

• GET /*/content (return 412 if content is not immediately accessible - ie. offline)

New (Direct Access Url) (MNT-22696)

• POST /nodes/{nodeId}/versions/{versionId}/renditions/{renditionId}/request-direct-access-url

Updated (Direct Access Url)

• POST /nodes/{nodeId}/request-direct-access-url
• POST /nodes/{nodeId}/renditions/{renditionId}/request-direct-access-url
• POST /nodes/{nodeId}/versions/{versionId}/request-direct-access-url
• POST /deleted-nodes/{nodeId}/request-direct-access-url
• POST /deleted-nodes/{nodeId}/renditions/{renditionId}/request-direct-access-url

Updated (Upload) (MNT-22462)

• POST /nodes/{nodeId}/children

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 7.2.0.

Search Services

Alfresco Search Services for Community Edition is 2.0 remains the latest release. Solr 6 is the underlying search engine for 2.0.

Note When relying on Search Services, usage of unauthenticated plain HTTP communication between ACS 7.2 and Solr is not encouraged. In order to use this kind of communication additional steps have to be taken compared to previous releases. You need to switch to SECRET or mTLS communication method, if using HTTP.

Alfresco Governance Services

AGS 7.2.0 is the latest release and is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.2.

Alfresco Mobile

Alfresco Mobile Workspace is 1.2 and is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.2.

We have sunset the Alfresco content Service Mobile App for iOS and Android, these applications have reached their EOM and are no longer supported. The replacement and fully supported application is Alfresco Mobile Workspace.

SDK

The latest release of the Alfresco in-process SDK is SDK 4.4, which is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.2.

The latest release of the Alfresco out-of-process Event SDK is SDK 5.1, which is compatible with Alfresco Content Services 7.2 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.

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 Mobile app 1.2 supports French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch only.

Feature Removals

No removal of 3rd party libraries

Contents

• Alfresco Content Repository 7.2.0 (SCM tag)
• Alfresco Share 7.2.0 (SCM tag)
• Alfresco Content Application 2.9.0 (SCM_tag)
• Alfresco File Transfer Receiver 7.0.0.1 (SCM tag)
• Alfresco Search Services 2.0.3 (SCM tag)
• Google Docs 3.2.1 (SCM tag)
• AOS Module 1.4.1 (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 8.3 x64
• Open JDK 11.0.13
• Tomcat 9.0.54
• Jetty 9.3.30.v20211001
• PostgreSQL 13.3

Library Upgrades

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

• Spring has been upgraded to 5.3.15 (from 5.3.2 in ACS 7.0)
• Camel has been upgraded to 3.15.0 (from 3.7.0 in ACS 7.0)
• Jakarta has been upgraded to 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 this release are below.

• MNT-22864: ACS-Packaging 7.1.1 artifacts are missing on Nexus
• MNT-22798: CRC collision on contentURL ending in same 12 characters causes document to have wrong contentURL
• MNT-22780: Rule Behavior Incorrect with Remove Aspect & Child Aspect
• MNT-22696: Replace Renditions via REST API
• MNT-22680: Some formatting elements not displaying when viewing a wiki page after ACS v5.2.7.12 installed
• MNT-22612: [Security] Quickshare XSS
• MNT-22601: Admin Console functionality becomes unusable in Alfresco v7.0.1.3
• MNT-22586: alfresco-authorised-users-7.2.jar missing in Alfresco Enterprise Releases repository in Nexus
• MNT-22529: [Security] multiple jquery vulnerabilities
• MNT-22507: [Security] MyBatis deserialization vulnerability
• MNT-22491: Transform Service - Once down does not pick up version changes on restart
• MNT-22462: cm:versionable mandatory aspect cause the node creation REST API to create 2 versions instead of one
• MNT-22410: FTS information is not accurate in summary report
• MNT-22136: WebDAV PROPFIND returns 302 code instead of 404 when using ACS Repo docker image (eg. via docker-compose)
• MNT-21953: Configuration for Handling Failed Thumbnail Creation No Longer Works
• MNT-21551: Creating links to Folder does not work when default root node is changed
• MNT-22911: Search Services: Solr cannot start when OpenJDK version is four parts or greater

Known Issues

None