Different approaches of Accessing Alfresco Services

As alfresco services are the only tools we can use for making any changes inside alfresco. Here i am writing some of the approaches for getting them.

There are three approaches i have used till now for accessing the alfresco services ( Searchservice, NodeService etc) in a class.

1. Accessing through application context.

As mentioned in alfresco documentation and in examples too, we can get the application context object from alfresco utility class 'ApplicationContextHelper'

// Do not forget to include alfresco jars into your project
ApplicationContext ctx = ApplicationContextHelper.getApplicationContext();

Now from application context, get the service registry bean having all the registered services for alfresco, like this

ServiceRegistry serviceRegistry = (ServiceRegistry) ctx.getBean(ServiceRegistry.SERVICE_REGISTRY);

And from this service registry object you can get any alfresco services, for e.g like this

SearchService searchService = serviceRegistry.getSearchService();
NodeService nodeService = serviceRegistry.getNodeService();

OR

You can get it by following these steps also

ApplicationContext appContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("alfresco/application-context.xml");

ServiceRegistry registry = (ServiceRegistry)appContext.getBean(ServiceRegistry.SERVICE_REGISTRY);

2. Getting services from repository directly

SearchService searchService = Repository.getServiceRegistry(FacesContext.getCurrentInstance()).getSearchService();

3. Setting services into properties in faces context and accessing it directly just by declaring getters and setters

a. Register your bean into faces-config-custom.xml and set the services you want to use in your class between <manage-property> tag with property-name and value, for example, below i have declared search service to be used into the bean i am declaring


<managed-bean>
<description>{Bean Description You want to Provide}</description>
<managed-bean-name>{Bean Name}</managed-bean-name>
<managed-bean-class>
{Package Name.Bean Name}
</managed-bean-class>
<managed-bean-scope>session</managed-bean-scope>
<managed-property>
<property-name>searchService</property-name>
<value>#{SearchService}</value>
</managed-property>       
</managed-bean>

b. Declare and write the getters and setters for the properties you have declared and want to use in your class

public class TestClass
{
private SearchService searchService;
/** Your code */
public SearchService getSearchService() {
return searchService;
}
public void setSearchService(SearchService searchService) {
this.searchService = searchService;
}
}