Authenticating to Alfresco
To connect to Alfresco, the following connection properties must be supplied: User, Password, and InstanceUrl. User and Password should correspond to the login credentials that you use to access Alfresco in a web browser. InstanceUrl corresponds to the Alfresco instance you will be querying. For instance, if you expect your queries to hit https://search-demo.dev.alfresco.me/alfresco/api/-default-/public/search/versions/1/sql, you should supply search-demo.dev.alfresco.me for InstanceUrl.
Using Alfresco Driver
The Alfresco driver exposes the alfresco table in order to pass queries to the Alfresco Search SQL API. The driver supports translating most SQL-92 queries into the SQL syntax required by the Alfresco Search SQL API. However, syntax limitations and incompatibilities do exist. A full overview of the capabilities and restrictions of the Search SQL API syntax is maintained in Alfresco documentation, but important syntax requirements and limitations for the API and driver are documented below:
- The aggregation functions COUNT(*), SUM(numeric_field), AVG(numeric_field), MAX(numeric_field), and MIN(numeric_field) are supported. The COUNT(specific_field) or COUNT(DISTINCT specific_field) aggregations are unsupported.
- HAVING can only be applied to aggregation functions.
- LIKE, JOIN, and UNION are unsupported.
- Sub-queries are not supported.
- The following should be used in place of an IS NULL filter: where cm_content != '*'. The following should be used in place of an IS NOT NULL filter: where cm_content = '*'.
- The CMIS Query Language functions IN_TREE, IN_FOLDER, SCORE, and CONTAINS are unsupported.
Locales and Timezones
The Alfresco Search SQL API allows you to specify a couple of settings that will impact that way data is transmitted. These include:
- Locales: The Alfresco locales for which you would like to get data.
- Timezone: Determines the timezone sent to Alfresco in API requests.
Customizing the SSL Configuration
By default, the provider attempts to negotiate SSL/TLS by checking the server's certificate against the system's trusted certificate store. To specify another certificate, see the SSLServerCert property for the available formats to do so.
Connecting Through a Firewall or Proxy
HTTP Proxies
To connect through the Windows system proxy, you do not need to set any additional connection properties. To connect to other proxies, set ProxyAutoDetect to false.
In addition, to authenticate to an HTTP proxy, set ProxyAuthScheme, ProxyUser, and ProxyPassword, in addition to ProxyServer and ProxyPort.
Other Proxies
Set the following properties:
- To use a proxy-based firewall, set FirewallType, FirewallServer, and FirewallPort.
- To tunnel the connection, set FirewallType to TUNNEL.
- To authenticate, specify FirewallUser and FirewallPassword.
- To authenticate to a SOCKS proxy, additionally set FirewallType to SOCKS5.
Troubleshooting the Connection
To show provider activity from query execution to network traffic, use Logfile and Verbosity. The examples of common connection errors below show how to use these properties to get more context. Contact the support team for help tracing the source of an error or circumventing a performance issue.
- Authentication errors: Typically, recording a Logfile at Verbosity 4 is necessary to get full details on an authentication error.
- Queries time out: A server that takes too long to respond will exceed the provider's client-side timeout. Often, setting the Timeout property to a higher value will avoid a connection error. Another option is to disable the timeout by setting the property to 0. Setting Verbosity to 2 will show where the time is being spent.
- The certificate presented by the server cannot be validated: This error indicates that the provider cannot validate the server's certificate through the chain of trust. If you are using a self-signed certificate, there is only one certificate in the chain.
To resolve this error, you must verify yourself that the certificate can be trusted and specify to the provider that you trust the certificate. One way you can specify that you trust a certificate is to add the certificate to the trusted system store; another is to set SSLServerCert.