Alfresco Share Flash Preview

[benswitzer]

Good day.

Been kicking the tires on the latest beta of 3.0 and have been having an issue with the flash document preview.  I have only ever seen the dark grey box with the spinning patter in the middle.

I've installed the Windows Setup as per the instructions with MySQL.  There no exceptions being through at the default log level.

Do I have to install the other SWF Tools?  Thoughts on how I might get this to work.

Thanks,
Ben

[rjreb]

I found on Debian 64 bit it helps if you have the libpoppler-dev installed before compiling swftools-2009-02-16-1757

[jayjayecl]

Hi,

I have some troubles with the flash preview feature.
Reading this thread helped me try many things… none of them worked.

1/ Now, the links provided here about the Oct 08 version of SWFtools is dead, and there is no way finding this version on swftools website.
2/ I tried with SWFTools latest stable release for Unix, v 0.8.1, it did not work.
3/ I just tried with SWFTools latest release for Unix swftools-2009-02-16-1757.tar.gz, it's not better.

I am RHEL 5.3, I tried with IE6 Flash 10, and FireFox 10.0.22, and IE6 FLash 9.24

Anyone having a perfect config that really works ?

[jayjayecl]

my mistake : I was always testing with the same documents … When I then uploaded a new document, it worked (no with FF3, Flash 10, but no matter)

[intrus13]

I'm pretty new to Alfresco and am having this same issue "still."  Has anyone found a "practical" solution to this yet?  I don't believe downgrading Flash Player more than a full version on multiple clients in a production environment is very practical.

Even after downgrading my flash player on a few test boxes and upgrading to the latest and greatest versions of everything (such as swftools, OO, etc) it still doesn't work.   Can anyone help please?

[mikeh]

This topic is pretty old now - Flash 10 is fully supported.

When you same "same issue" what exactly is the issue? Are the transformers registered correctly on server start-up - i.e. ImageMagick, pdf2swf and OpenOffice?

Mike

[intrus13]

This topic is pretty old now - Flash 10 is fully supported.

When you same "same issue" what exactly is the issue? Are the transformers registered correctly on server start-up - i.e. ImageMagick, pdf2swf and OpenOffice?

Mike

The exact issue is that when I click on a document in the Library, using IE or Firefox on a Linux or Windows machine running Flash 9.x or 10.x , all I get is the spinning arrows.  I have tried this using the Windows complete install (with OO) and also the Linux 3 "stable" install on CentOS 5.2 running against a MySQL database.  I get the same results in all imaginable combinations of servers/clients.

In regards to the transformers they all appear to be working. The preview icon's are correct and show a representation of the first page like they are supposed to.  I also checked in the /tomcat/temp/Alfresco directory and see a large number of files, include multiple swf files.  I've opened these flash files directly in FireFox and they play like they are supposed to.

Also, just now, I tried uploading a jpeg which worked correctly.  I cannot get previews to work for Word, Excel, PDF, or ODT files (I haven't tested any other formats)

I've also checked alfresco.log and it looks like a "clean" startup to me with nothing but a bunch of "INFO" entries.

[mikeh]

I would try doing manual transforms using the Explorer (JSF) web client. Go to the details page for a Word document for example, Run Action then transform and choose PDF. Check the PDF is ok. Then transform that PDF to SWF using the same method.

The most likely explanation is that one of the transformers in the chain isn't doing it's job correctly - we just need to figure out which one.

Mike

[intrus13]

Thank you for your help thus far.  Here is what I have done since my last post:

To make this slightly easier I created a content rule to transform all inbound content into a PDF and then a second rule to transform all inbound PDF's into a Flash Presentation on the Linux Server running Labs 3 Stable AND a Windows XP test box running the Mar 10th Nightly Build (Lab 3e Dev). 

The clients I have tried this on are running Windows XP Professional with IE7, Firefox 3.0.7, and Flash 10.0.22.87 (same physical machine as the Window's server setup) and a Linux client with a "fresh" install of CentOS 5.2 running Firefox 3.0b5 and Flash 10.0.15.3.  The Window's client/server has OpenOffice 3.0.0 and the Linux client has 2.3.0.

All combinations of clients and servers were able to transform ODT and DOC files into PDF's and then immediately into SWF Flash Presentations that exactly match their originals.  The test documents have been simple one page text only documents and multi-page documents with images.

Any other ideas?

[intrus13]

Okay, I got Preview working for the Windows server.  I uninstalled everything including OpenOffice and deleted the Alfresco directory on the C: drive.  After a reboot and a reinstall they EVENTUALLY work.  I'm assuming they're slow because the machine isn't a real powerhouse and it's using the Derby database.  But, that really doesn't matter all that much to me since I want to be running the Linux version because I have actual server hardware that is already running Linux

Also, I upgraded OpenOffice to 3.0 on the Linux server and have performed the same tests with no change (I have confirmed the "PDF Producer" is OpenOffice.org 3.0 so that appears to be working fine).  I still end up with working PDF's and SWF's, but a spinning arrow.

[mikeh]

Thanks for the files. As I suspected, it looks like your copy of swftools is too old - pdf2swf is generating AVM1 movie clips, which are not compatible with ActionScript 3.

There's a note about this somewhere in the release notes, but it's easy to miss. We were hoping to be able to support AVM1 clips, which is why there isn't currently a useful warning displayed in the previewer - our bad.

Basically you need to get the source from swftools.org and rebuild to get a version newer than 0.8.1.

Thanks,
Mike