No preview for office documents (random behavior)

[majykoyster]

Hi there

I'm an Alfresco newbie, so please excuse me for any stupid question. I swear I searched extensively before posting !

I installed several Alfresco versions in the past weeks, including community 4.2.c, d and e, and enterprise 4.1.6 [edit] now running 4.2.0 enterprise [/edit]. Each time I did it on a freshly installed and updated 64 bits Debian 7.1.

The issue is, with some installations previews of MS Office documents (files from Office 2003 to 1013) work, with others they don't. I follow the exact same procedure each time (see bellow), but get various results. Sometimes previews stop working for no apparent reason, and restarting the service or rebooting doesn't help. [edit] never worked with 4.2.0 enterprise [/edit]

Here's the exhaustive list of the steps of my latest installations :

1 - as recommanded on Jira for that preview issue : apt-get install libice6 libsm6 libxt6 libxrender1 libfontconfig1 libcups2
2 - install Alfresco 4.2.e on fresh 64 bits Debian 7.1 in "easy mode", all default parameters.
3 - reboot (4.2.e only, to deal with the preview bug mentioned in the release note).
4 - login, create site then upload files (xls, doc, pdf, from recent and old versions of MS Office)
5 - "preparing preview" followed by "file cannot be previewed" error

I searched for solutions for quite a long time. Most were about older versions of Alfresco and dealt with openoffice installation, but, unless I'm wrong, recent ones already include it.
I tried several fixes I found on this forum (lately editing alfresco-global.properties as follows : "ooo.enabled=false" and "jodconverter.enabled=true"), with no luck.

The random nature of that issue makes it quite frustrating to me. If that's of any help, I installed Alfresco on two different machines. One on a Proxmox virtual machine with a pretty old host (quite slow), one on a VmWare virtual machine with a very powerful host. Both have at least the required 2Gb of ram.

Most likely I'm missing a basic configuration step, I doubt that's just a common bug…

I attached my latest alfresco.log file. It comes from the 4.1.6 enterprise version, still functioning normally.

Thanks in a advance for any input. I'd gladly give any additional detail needed.

[eswbitto]

I'm thinking it has to do with your file size and file type….Issues that I have come up with this specifically had to do with pdf files.

content.transformer.complex.OpenOffice.Pdf2swf.extensions.doc.swf.maxSourceSizeKBytes=10240
content.transformer.complex.OpenOffice.Pdf2swf.extensions.docx.swf.maxSourceSizeKBytes=10240
content.transformer.OpenOffice.extensions.docx.pdf.maxSourceSizeKBytes=10240
‍‍‍‍‍

put that in your alfresco-global.properties and restart the service. See if that helps….The other thing that would help is reviewing the logs when you try and navigate to the document. That will give you a clue into how you need to proceed.

[majykoyster]

Thanks for your input !

I already tried this a couple weeks ago, it didn't change anything. Among the file that can't be previewed are very small, almost empty word or excel files, even .txt files with just a few signs. The size doesn't seem to be the issue, since either everything works, including rather big PDF files, or nothing works, including text files under 1kB…

[majykoyster]

I installed 4.2.0 enterprise today, on a fresh Debian Wheezy as always, and the "cannot be previewed" message is back. I just installed in easy mode, with all default settings, rebooted, created a site, uploaded various files (txt, word, pdf, xls, recent format and old ones, big and small files). None can be previewed.

If anyone as a clue, I'd be glad to know ! I join the log file.



edit :
I just installed from scratch another time. It still doesn't work. I noticed I can add files via drag and drop, but clicking "import to warehouse" then "add files" gives me an error. The upload doesn't even start. The log file is unchanged since the end of the installation.

edit 2 :
adding files through "import to warehouse" works in Internet Explorer, still no preview. I always used Firefox before, even when previews were working fine.

[rjohnson]

From your log, although it says "for informational purposes only", it looks to me like OpenOffice (LibreOffice as it now is) is not running. Can't tell you why but if you don't have OpenOffice running you will not get previews for most documents.

[majykoyster]

Thanks for the input !
I found something that might be interesting regarding Libreoffice.

The alfresco.sh file mentions "LIBREOFFICE_SCRIPT=$INSTALLDIR/libreoffice/scripts/ctl.sh"

"ctl.sh" doesn't exist. The only file in that folder is "libreoffice_ctl.sh".

I never touched that file. How can it be wrong ? It seems to work for everybody else. I'm missing something. I made a copy named "ctl.sh", restarting Alfresco…

edit : nothing changed after restart the alfresco service or rebooting.

edit : Exploring some issues reported on Jira. Installing libcups2 as mentioned didn't change a thing. actually, none of the libraries required by LibreOffice were installed (libice6 libsm6 libxt6 libxrender1 libfontconfig1 libcups2). I installed them all, nothing changed.

edit (again) : things seem less random with 4.2.0 enterprise, since previews never worked on 3 different installations.