topic Re: Transform content when it's being downloaded in Alfresco Archive

Transform content when it's being downloaded

machtech — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:11:01 GMT

Hi all,Pretend I have items that are stored as text in the repository, but when the user clicks to download the file, I want to automatically transform the content to PDF.How can I achieve this "on-the-fly" transformation on the way out of the repository?Regards,Johan

Re: Transform content when it's being downloaded

mrogers — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:17:35 GMT

The easiest way to do this is to use a rule to transform the content on upload. And then your users download the PDF.

If each user needs their own copy of the PDF, for example if it is watermarked in some way, then you need to inject your transformation code into a content reader.

Re: Transform content when it's being downloaded

machtech — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:54:42 GMT

Cheers for that, I will look into the content reader - can you point me at an example in the Alfresco codebase? Is there any documentation for extending one?

Re: Transform content when it's being downloaded

zaizi — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 11:15:41 GMT

We did this for a project. When a user downloads a content it does a custom transformation and applies watermarking and PDF encryption on the fly. Create and configure a custom download servlet to do this and use that as the download link. Please not however, that there is a performance implication to this. Doing transformation on the fly isn't going to scale very easily.