This is primarily a question of possibilities more than instructions. I'm a programming consultant working on a WSS project site system for my client. We have a document library in which files are uploaded to go through a complex approval process. With multiple stages in this process, we have an extra field which dictates what the current status of the document is.
Now, my client has become enamored with the idea of PDF watermarking. He wants the document (which is already a PDF) to be affixed with a watermark corresponding to the current status, such that with each stage of the approval process the watermark will change.
One method, the traditional method for PDF watermarking, of accomplishing this is to have one "clean" copy of the document somewhere hidden on the site, and create a new PDF from it that has the watermark at each stage of the approval process. Since the filename will never change, this new PDF can be uploaded continually to a public library, always overwriting the old version and simulating a "dynamically changing watermark". However, in the various stages there will also be people uploading clean copies with corrections and suggestions, nevermind the complex nature of juggling around two libraries and the fact we double the number of files stored. My client and I agree that this is not a practical path to choose.
What we would like to do is be able to "modify" the watermark in a PDF, so that we only have to keep one copy of the file. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, in most cases when you make something like a watermark, which in its nature is supposed to be "unmodifyable", you won't be able to edit it later. So, is it possible to have a part of a PDF which cannot be changed by anyone who downloads the file, but can be changed as part of a workflow or other object model process?
PDF Watermarking in SharePoint is a common request. I have written extensively on this topic. See:
Adding a dynamic watermark to a PDF file from a SharePoint Workflow
Adding a (static) watermark to a PDF file from a SharePoint Workflow
Use SharePoint Workflows to inject JavaScript into PDFs and print the ‘open date’
You could use Event Handlers such that code was run every time a document was checked in. In that code you could perform the fixup/check that made the watermark be what you wanted it to be. This assumes you can write code that manipulates a PDF's internal structure such that it has the watermark that you desire.
It sounds to me like you want to allow people to modify the PDF they download, but not modify its watermark. This is probably going to be nigh on impossible if the watermark is embedded in the PDF (afaict) but what if the watermark image is external to the PDF; is it possible to embed a watermark in a PDF that is sourced via HTTP? Then you could embed:
<watermark image="http://sharepoint/site/_vti_bin/docstatus.asmx?id=5">
Of course, I have no idea about PDFs, so this might not be possible but you get the concept.
-Oisin
It is possible to do so if you use third party tool. Then you can put dynamically binded value from your SharePoint metadata, conditions, rules etc: http://www.pdfsharepoint.com
Related
I am trying to build a flow based on the PowerAutomate template
Create Planner task and add attachments to SharePoint on new email
arrival
This template works fine, in that it saves all the mail attachments to my sharepoint. But it only shows the link to the last attachment in the task.
I have worked around it, by adding a string variable and appending all the sharepoint paths to this variable.
With my Flow, everything runs smoothly. But the stored files are about 10%- 20% bigger in size than the original and they turn out to be corrupted.
The only difference I can spot in the saving of the file is as follows:
Template section has "get attachment" and the according "body('get attachment'):
While my in my version I can only select "get attachment (V2)" and the corresponding "body('get attachment (V2)')
There is an option with V2 that allows or disallows chunking, but there is no effect on my filesize.
The other difference is, that I have my flow create a different folder based on the task ID, since there where errors, if the same name attachment came a second time. But I have tried my flow without the added folders and there is no difference in file size.
The original files:
and the corrupted files:
It makes no difference if I use the sharepoint link provided through the flow to my new planner task, or if I open the files directly within sharepoint. The result is an error.
Can anyone guess, why my flow seems to store something more within the file and thus corrupting it? I can provide the other parts of the flow in more detail too. Here is the overview of my custom flow:
I actually found the answer after rewriting it from scratch:
Using the old template had me looking for the wrong information when adding the attachment content to sharepoint. I had always searched for "body" which was used in the template and gave me this
But searching for attachment the dynamic content actually showed me the right pieces. I am not sure, if I missed it before, or if recoding a template hid them somehow. With the rewrite from scratch I found this:
So, to make a long story short: Use "Content Bytes" of the "Get_Attachment_(V2)" Method and everything works fine.
I am trying to implement a document management system using Sharepoint. One major issue is that colleagues cannot find documents in the current setup (local fileserver). They have asked that we have a system that scans uploaded documents and automatically looks for keywords in them and then populates a "Meta" column.
I have had sort of success with OCR on image files, but getting keywords out of office documents (doc, xls etc.) I have had no success until now.
Is there a way to setup a flow to do this task for me?
any help is much aprechiated.
i tried "Get file metadata" and Azure "Text analysis", but it seems to take the raw data of the files (XML I assume) and returns that the document is to large to analyse.
There is something vague about this requirement - how is a keyword defined in a document?
Therefore, first obvious solution would be to assign keywords for each file upon uploading it. You may create a process for this with flow - have tasks, reminders and so on.
Automating this with OCR first means that you need to user OCR that works with MS flow you have only one choice - ElasticOCR. Then, in your flow
- feed the document content to the ElasticOCR action
- keep in mind that OCR is not 100% accurate
- analyze the generated text content according to your keyword definition
- finally write the meta back to the library in the corresponding columns.
Having worked on a similar requirement, we asked uploaders to publish their documents with a short abstract(column from the content type). The assumption is the abstract contains the keywords and is stored in a multi-line column - making it searchable site wide.
With newly released Webi there's no way to manipulate reports with VBA like it was in DESKI era.
I'd like to know if there's a way for me to click a button with parameters in Excel sheet and get a report from the server?
I've been thinking of using the RESTful Web-services but it seems that there is a performance problem.
I also considered using a JAVA app in the middle using the SDK but it's not really satisfying as I add one layer.
Do you know if there's an other way to download a Webi report from and to Excel?
For this type of requirement, you'd normally use the OpenDocument feature. There is one thing that it won't do however, at least not for Webi documents, and that is deliver the output in Excel format (HTML and PDF are the two possible formats for Webi). In all fairness, the export to Excel option is only about two or three clicks away, but I can understand that this wouldn't be an ideal solution.
Another option is the Java SDK, which I would not recommend, as the ReBEAN SDK (the part of the Java SDK you need to interface with Webi documents) is deprecated and replaced by the REST SDK.
The REST SDK would be the way to go if the OpenDocument feature is not sufficient. Keep in mind that this would involve quite a few steps, each time sending a command to the WACS server and then decoding the answer. The steps would be:
Authenticate and get a logon token
Refresh the document (if necessary pass prompt values)
Export the document to Excel
Close the document
The REST interface is only supported on the WACS server, which should run on your BI4 server (unless you have a customised landscape). If it's slow, I would suggest looking into the root cause of this performance issue, instead of discarding the SDK altogether.
If you're going to use the REST interface, I would recommend opting for JSON to communicate through REST instead of XML. It's easier to read and parse.
A last option, which I wouldn't recommend, is LiveOffice. This is a separate product which allows you to embed contents from Webi documents into Office documents (most notably Excel). LiveOffice has always had its share of problems and has not received much love from SAP regarding much needed updates.
One final thought: the report will never appear in the same sheet, at least not without an additional amount of coding. Whatever SDK you end up choosing, you will always end up with an Excel file. If you want to show the results in the Excel file you started from, you'll need to code the steps to open the generated file, grab the contents and then copy those to your worksheet.
I have to programmatically move (archive) a document from document library of a site collection to a document library of another site collection in SharePoint 2010, when a specific value is set for a column in the doc lib.
Would it be possible to write code for this scenario in an event receiver? Is there any other way?
If anybody has any relevant piece of code or links, please share.
Thanks in advance!
You could perhaps do a copy operation, then delete the original file.
Have a look at the following link, which discusses copying a file from one site to another:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.spfilecollection.aspx
The example uses one site collection. However, if you convert the source document to a byte array you can always instantiate the target site collection and add the binary data to a document library within that site collection.
Certainly the copy operation should would work within the event receiver. However, I'm not certain what will happen if you try to delete the file within the receiver (there may be concurrency issues). If the delete does not work, consider firing a one-time timer job to delete the file (which would occur in a different process).
You can try SPExport Class of SharePoint, as per this Article Copy or Move SharePoint items looks like few of the Operations that we do in SharePoint UI uses this API internally to acheive the task. Also this Approach depends if you are trying to do it one time or its going to be a repeatative process.
At the moment, we use MS WORD and MS EXCEL to mail merge documents that needs to be sent to multiple recepients.
For example, say there is a complaint form where the complainant needs to fill in his/her name, address, etc. So we have a .doc file set up with the content and the dynamic entities set up for mail merging, with the name and address details put in an excel file, from where we can happily mail merge to generate all or just the necessary forms/documents.
However, I would like to automate this process, like a form in a website where the complainant can fill in his/her name, address and other details, and we could use that to generate the complaint form automatically and offer it to be downloaded (preferrably as a pdf).
Now, the only solution that comes to mind, is Latex, so that I can just replace the needed entities and just compile to PDF. However, that bit has to be negotiated with the webhost, if they are offering Latex or not.
Is there any other solution? Any other way we could get this done, with something that shouldn't be a problem for most webhosting solutions to offer?
EDIT: I would prefer a non .NET or rather non microsoft solution since, the servers are running linux and while mono might be capable of getting the job done, none of our devs know any .NET languages. However, if required we might have to dwelve into it.
Generating PDF using an XSL. Check the following: Apoc XSL-FO
You will need to create an XML file with the required fields and transform that with this tool.
If you wish to avoid .NET then XSL-FO is worth a look. Try the FOray project.
XSLT can be a steep learn if you do not have experience already. Also users will not be able to change the templates without asking the XSLT guru to do it.
If your templates are already in MS Word and MS Excel then I would stick with generating MS docs on the server. These are now easy to work with from code since OpenXML - check out OfficeOpenXML and OpenXMLDeveloper
Apache FOP : http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
I suggest generating rtf on the server: it's easy enough to automatically generate using cpan's RTF::Writer, has converters generating good pdf, can be edited by hand in word, oo-writer & TextEdit, doesn't have any really bad compatibility issues between the main editing applications, and has decent text & resource extraction tools, with text extraction being rather better than pdf.
There's some support for moving between rtf & latex, although the best rtf -> latex converter, docx2tex, depends on the System.IO.Packaging .net module, whose mono implementation isn't yet rock solid.
Postscript — Not a recommendation: it's too much of an unwieldy sledgehammer for this job, but iText will generate the pdf directly from the form data. If you wanted to do fancy things like signed pdf, that would be the way to go.
Postscript #2 — If you break up the Word document into individual files using word's master document representation, then you can clobber one of the parts with hand-generated content. This makes it easy to do something approximating form-filling on word .doc files using just standard file-utils and some trivial rtf->doc tweaking.