Create Bulk Users Admin Console Component for Alfresco Share

Author: Will Abson

This add-on provides a Share administration console component to bulk-create repository users from CSV or JSON data.

Although similar to the capability provided in the built-in Users console component, this component offers a dedicated user interface with many options for customising the way in which users are created.

Specifically the add-on provides support for

• Either JSON or CSV input data
• Customising which mandatory and optional fields are provided, plus the order of fields in the case of CSV data
• Automatic username and password generation, based on configurable policies
• Flexible logging of a report of all accounts created
• Template-based e-mail notifications to users containing their account credentials

The add-on should work with Alfresco version 3.3 and onwards.

Installation

The component is packaged as a single JAR file for easy installation into Alfresco Share.

To install the component, simply drop the create-bulk-users-<version>.jar file into the tomcat/shared/lib folder within your Alfresco installation, and restart the application server. You might need to create this folder if it does not already exist.

Custom Configuration (optional)

To change the default behaviour of the utility (e.g. logging, e-mail templates, parameter order), review the repository web script configuration file create-users.post.config.xml and override this using the normal mechanism in your installation.

Building from Source

An Ant build script is provided to build a JAR file containing the custom files, which can then be installed into the tomcat/shared/lib folder of your Alfresco installation.

To build the JAR file, run Ant from the base project directory.

ant dist-jar

The command should build a JAR file named create-bulk-users-<version>.jar in the build/dist directory within your project, which you can then copy into the tomcat/shared/lib folder of your Alfresco installation.

Alternatively, you can use the build script to hot deploy the JAR file directly into a local Tomcat instance for testing. You will need to use the hotcopy-tomcat-jar task and set the tomcat.home property in Ant.

ant -Dtomcat.home=C:/Alfresco/tomcat hotcopy-tomcat-jar

After you have deployed the JAR file you will need to restart Tomcat to ensure it picks up the changes.

Usage

1. Log in to Alfresco Share and navigate to an Administration page such as Users or Groups
2. In the left-hand-side navigation, click Create Bulk Users
3. Type or paste in your CSV or JSON data into the User Data field. Click Help for details of the data format required.
4. Click on Create Users to create accounts using the supplied details