Dealing with Files

This chapter will show you how to present minutes of your club meetings on a private page of your club’s website, organized by year (note: «Procès-verbaux» means «Minutes» in English):

Minutes in the club's website

and in the mobile application, since version 7.0:

Verbale nell'applicazione mobile LionsBase

Nota

As you see, the mobile application does not show all minutes unlike the website. This can be easily controlled so that you do not show too many useless documents to your members in the mobile application.

Uploading and Organizing your Minutes

To start with, you need to open module File > Filelist:

Module File > Filelist

You are totally free to organize documents the way you want. In this club, the minutes are organized by (civil) year and saved in a dedicated «Minutes» folder, so that the folder only contains minutes and no any other documents. This is particularly useful when you want to easily prepare an organized list of minutes as we have shown on the very first screenshot of this chapter:

Suggested folder structure

Suggerimento

If you possibly wonder why there are more command icons than what you see for your club folder, please pay attention to the checkbox «Extended view» which we checked at the end of the list.

Nota

You should know how to upload a document or create a folder but if not, upload best works by drag-and-dropping one or more documents from your computer to the zone slightly above the list of files, below the title. As easy as that! and to create folders, use the icon with a «+» in the toolbar.

Showing Documents in the Mobile Application

We will first describe how to show some documents in the mobile application since it is quick and part of the workflow will be useful when you prepare the page in the club’s website.

You will need to edit the metadata of your (minutes) documents by either clicking on its file name or clicking the well-known pencil command icon:

Editing metadata of a file

We will concentrate on important steps only, feel free to test other settings. On tab «General», you may want to adapt the title of the document:

Title of the document

Nota

The title is automatically extracted from the metadata of your document when you upload it. But this works naturally only if you took care of well-prepare your document before uploading it.

Then move on to tab «Access». The checkbox «Visible» should naturally be checked but this is the default. You may want to restrict access. Please note that for club documents this only makes sense if documents should be restricted to the committee only as club documents will never be visible to members outside your club, even if you do not configure special access restrictions (please read section More on File Access Restrictions below if you want to learn more).

This could be useful if within the «Minutes» folder you want certain documents to be invisible to standard members.

Restrictions to access documents

Nota

In the context of the club’s website however, if the page we will configure later on is accessible by any Lions member, then you may want to select your club and restrict access to the given file. But this is your choice and your responsibility to properly configure access to your content and documents in your club’s website. Don’t worry, this chapter will tell you how to properly restrict access using sensible defaults.

Final step is to categorize your document with one (or more) of the «Documents» categories on tab «Categories»:

Tagging your document

That’s it! Save and instantly your document will be available in the mobile application:

Verbale nell'applicazione mobile LionsBase

Nota

Sono supportati i seguenti tipi di documenti: PDF, Word (doc, docx) e Excel (xls, xlsx).

Suggerimento

Vale la pena ricordare che il modo in cui si sceglie di organizzare i file nella cartella del club non avrà alcun impatto sul modo in cui tali file saranno accessibili all’interno dell’applicazione mobile. Infatti, l’applicazione mobile organizzerà logicamente i vari file a disposizione di un determinato utente in base alle categorie associate, alla loro provenienza (il club, la zona, …) e utilizzerà sottocartelle basate sull’anno (di creazione) se sono presenti troppi file in una determinata cartella. Tutto ciò è automatico!

How extracting of the «year» of a document works

You may wonder how the grouping by year is done. Here are the rules:

  1. We try to extract the year from the title (metadata), and then from the file name itself.

  2. If we can match something that looks like a full date in ISO format (yyyy-mm-dd or yyyy.mm.dd), then the corresponding year part is taken as the «year of the document».

  3. Otherwise, if we can match something that looks like a full date in common European order (dd.mm.yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy), the same applies.

  4. Altrimenti, se si può abbinare qualcosa che assomiglia a un anno (4 cifre che iniziano con 19 o 20 per 19xx o 20xx, vale lo stesso discorso.

  5. Finally if nothing works, we take the date of creation of the document and use the year part.

Nota

That business logic will not work for (real-life use case!) a document without any meaningful «title» and whose name is LcRs01Cj2022-2023.05.07.2022.pdf. As a human you will understand that the 2022-2023 part is a Lions year, whereas the document has the date 05.07.2022. But the algorithm will wrongly match on 2023.05.07 instead and thus group that document with year 2023.

As such, we highly suggest that you never ever publish documents with cryptic names but take some time to give your documents meaningful and helpful titles.

Showing Documents in the Club’s Website

TYPO3 makes it extremely easy to prepare once for all a dedicated page showing all available documents within a given directory / folder:

Minutes in the club's website

To do so, we suggest that you create a new page in your website, for instance under «Private Pages» and possibly edit it to restrict access to your club’s members only.

Using module Web > Page, select your newly-created page in the page tree and click the button to create a new content element:

Module Web > Page
Button to create a new content element

Then choose the plugin «File List - List of files»:

Insert a plugin of type List of files

Infine, configurate il plugin in base alle vostre esigenze (dovrete scegliere la cartella per la quale mostrare i contenuti, che è la nostra cartella «Minuti») e sicuramente spuntare la casella di controllo per consentire la navigazione nelle sottocartelle se avete delle sottocartelle per anno e volete permettere ai vostri membri di sfogliarle:

Configure the plugin List of files

Nota

La casella di controllo per consentire la navigazione nelle sottocartelle potrebbe essere visibile solo dopo aver salvato il plugin per la prima volta.

More on File Access Restrictions

So you master everything on this page and would like to know more about access restrictions to the files you upload. This section is the transcript of a topic raised in the LionsBase Slack channel, do not hesitate to join us.

The question was: How do access restrictions on files work and how does it behave when no special restrictions are specified. No special restrictions here means nothing selected for «Access»:

Restrictions to access documents

Nota

Disclaimer: information given may differ slightly if you are not in the context of your club’s website.

We have to consider mainly 2 to 3 contexts where documents are listed (and thus made accessible):

  1. When using the File List plugin (see section).

  2. When sharing documents in the mobile application (see section).

  3. Direct link to a file within the website.

First of all, don’t be afraid, prior to the preparation of mobile application version 7.0, all documents were «public» (no access restrictions). So now that you are able to define access rights, you can fine-tune access but your existing documents are not suddenly «more public» than before!

Context #1

Cominciamo con il primo contesto, quando si utilizza il plugin Elenco file (che consente di creare anche gallerie di foto). Ad esempio, quando si configura questo plugin in una pagina per mostrare tutti i documenti presenti in una specifica cartella di club (ed eventualmente in sottocartelle).

Access restrictions are based on capabilities of the underlying TYPO3 extension «file_list». This is a public TYPO3 extension of Xavier Perseguers, nothing LionsBase-specific and since February 2020, it respects those access rights as well: https://extensions.typo3.org/extension/file_list (naturally your LionsBase instance is using the latest version of that extension). So since that point of time, you could have e.g., a page restricted to your club members with a plugin showing all files within a given directory, but if you mark some files within the directory to be accessible only by the committee, then the very same page in your website, with a single access configuration will behave differently if you are only a member of the club or if you are part of the committee. One plugin, easy to configure!

Context #2

Second context is when you share documents within the mobile application. Documents you share within your club are made accessible by your club members solely, even if you do not configure any access restrictions, members outside your club will not see those documents when they use the mobile application.

Context #3

Direct links to a file is when you create some content within your club’s website, like a block of «Text with images» and you configure a link to a file within your text content or on an image. Since this is purely a core TYPO3 context, TYPO3 will naturally respect any access restrictions. What might have changed since the release of the mobile application version 7.0 when we enhanced the view so that you may now granularly restrict access is that you possibly had some public news with a direct link to a document and once you restrict access on that file, the previous public link will vanish; but that is exactly what you would expect!

Documentation created using Sphinx 4.3.2 and integrated in TYPO3 with restdoc.