Document Management

phaider

Hello,

in the sample application there is a small document management system.

My idea would be to associate to each category a filetype, for example for letters use MS Word, for Spreadsheets use MS Excel, for Drafts use Notepad++, etc...

What would be to best approach, if the user creates a new document based on a selected category, to start the associated client application and asks after editing, if the file should be uploaded or not.

Any suggestions or ideas?

Peter

phaider

Hello,

in the meantime i made a look into the documentation (read before write ... 😃) and have found, that document templates could be created for excel, text and word.

How would it work for Open Office documents or for Autocad drawing files?

Peter

kklosson

Everything in my answer is a guess, but I have presumed that AwareIM opens a COM channel to Word and Excel which would be why those applications must be present on the server. Similar links to any other applications would have to be written custom and this presumes that those applications have robust COM exposure.

If I were you I would not hold my breath for this capability.

Again, my best guess.

aware_support

A couple of things to understand here:

1) Aware IM can store any file type in its database. The file will be uploaded and downloaded appropriately. Moreover, an appropriate application will be started for the file of a particular type when you click on the View Document button in the browser. ALL popular file types are supported through this functionality, including AutoCAD files. AutoCAD software will be started automatically. For this type of functionality Aware IM does not need to open any custom channel to edit the document.

2) Resolving expressions contained in the tags inside the document. As you know, Aware IM can automatically resolve tag expressions contained inside the documents and replace them with the actual data (similar to "mail merge").
Now this functionality DOES require Aware IM to open a custom channel for a specific document (COM is used for most MS documents). At the moment only text, Word and Excel documents are supported. However, custom plug-ins can be written to support other document types. I don't see, however, why you would want to insert tags in an AutoCAD document.

phaider

Hello,

regarding Autocad files:

In some situations, it could be necessary, to complete the properties of a drawing file with the public drawing no., customer, site, plan type, section, etc...

There are 2 ways:

The technican would insert theese values, and the document management would read them and stored it in the database, or the technican would insert the values in the database record, the document management would stored them in the drawing file (and open it, if needed).
The enter this data twice times, makes no happy users (technicans normally are sometimes lazy ... i have heard such rumours)

BTW: is such a workflow possible (without extend AwareIM with JavaCode)? Document Template stored in the database, open the document and finally ask the user, if the updated file show be uploaded or not (without prompting a file selector box)?

Peter

aware_support

If Aware IM has to insert data INSIDE THE DRAWING FILE iITSELF, it has to open the document using a public programming interface to this file if such interface exists. If the file is totally proprietary and the company owning the file did not provide any public programming interface for the file, then Aware IM CANNOT insert any data into the file.

Microsoft provides public programming interface to its files - this interface is called COM. I have no idea if AutoCAD provides any interface to their files - most probably they do. But even if they do, still a special code needs to be written to use this interface to insert data into the files - this is where a custom Java plug-in may be required.

rocketman

Just a quick comment on OpenOffice mentioned in an earlier post.

1) Install MS Office on your server and create document templates with your required tags in.

2) When these documents are requested by a user, the documents will open - complete with embedded data from the tags on any machine with a word processor/ spreadsheet capable of recognising/opening MS Word/Excel documents.

This includes PC's running OpenOffice among others