topic Re: PDFbox in Alfresco Archive

PDFbox

jcobb — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:09:59 GMT

Can't find much on PDFbox on the wiki or in the forums. I see PDFbox is capable of some useful stuff - merging pdf's and encrypting them.I'd like to be able to access this from webscripts, and/or from workflows, ie via javascript.The sort of things I have in mind - running a 'publish' action that co

Re: PDFbox

schambon — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:37:46 GMT

Hi,

So far as I'm aware the pdfbox api is not exposed to javascript. However you can pretty easily write an extension that does it. The instructions are here: http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/3.0_JavaScript_API#Adding_Custom_Script_APIs

Basically you need to write a Java encapsulation of the API you need from PDFBox, compile that (you'll need alfresco-repository.jar in the compile classpath) and hook that up into Alfresco's Spring configuration.

Hope that helps,
Sylvain.

Re: PDFbox

jcobb — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:46:47 GMT

Thanks Sylvain,

Mmmm, maybe I'll have to get my hands dirty and start compiling some java…

I've read about 'java backed webscripts' - which I think is also going to mean compiling jars - any thoughts as to which route is going to be easiest for me?

James

Re: PDFbox

schambon — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:07:38 GMT

Hi,

It'll definitely be easier for you to extend the Javascript API rather than write java-backed webscripts. The main difference is that if you extend the API, then you can go on writing all your scripts in JavaScript, so that's more future-proof in my opinion.