Standalone Transformation Server | Word to PDF Failure

[tlapinsk]

We've been dealing with an assortment of Standalone Transformation Server issues since we moved to 5.2.1 in January of this year. Currently our Production Transformation Server is running fine, but we are seeing issues in the Test environment.

In particular, it has revolved around Word to PDF conversions (error attached to this post). Our Test and Prod environments are replicated with the following specs:

Alfresco Version: 5.2.1

App Server: CentOS 6.9

DB: Microsoft SQL Server 2014

Transformation Server: Windows Server 2012 R2 SP2

The Transformation Server is installed to spec as stated here. The documentation is actually incomplete and doesn't specify that Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 must be 32 bit (now installed).

Has anyone encountered Word to PDF (or similar) problems recently in 5.2.1 while using the Standalone Transformation Server? Or even in previous Alfresco versions?

Any help is much appreciated!

[mehe]

You seem to be using Alfresco Enterprise Version - have you tried to contact your Enterprise Support?

[tlapinsk]

Martin Ehe‌ thanks for the reply. We have multiple Transformation Server cases open at the moment (including one outstanding bug fix) with Enterprise Support, but thought it would be worth asking the community as well.

Hopefully Enterprise Support can help us assess root cause on this one.

[mehe]

...because the transformation Server is a Enterprise Product and seldom installed by community users. So you would get only a few answers...

[cesarista]

I had some issues in Trasformation Server (with Alfresco 5.1.2) some time ago relating the generation of thumbnails (this is not Word to PDF transformation precisely). So I decided to disable remote transformation of thumbnails, and to do these transformations in local nodes.

Anyway, you can debug your transformations with in custom-log4j.properties with:

org.alfresco.repo.content.transform.TransformerDebug=DEBUG

Regards.

--C.

[tlapinsk]

Cesar Capillas‌ disabling remote thumbnail generation sounds like a great idea. I also came across this post, which echoes your thoughts on disabling thumbnails altogether to increase performance. 

In regards to debug, we have it enabled in our Test environment. It's been particularly helpful for us to isolate the incidents to strictly Word to PDF errors. It's also provided helpful tracing down to the PowerShell script that is throwing an error on the Remote Transformation Server, but is not detailed enough to help us trace the "value" that is out of range.

conversion output: Value does not fall within the expected range. 
At C:\Program Files (x86)\TransformationServer\tomcat\webapps\transformation-server\
WEB-INF\classes\com\westernacher\powershell\Convert-WordDocument.ps1:131 char:2‍‍‍‍

 If you have any other thoughts/recommendations for handling remote Transformations, let me know! 

[cesarista]

Hi:

What you are saying is to disable thumbnails generation and this can be done in some backend use cases, where users don't access to Alfresco Share, or in some cases for increasing performance. But I meant that with TS you have two possibilities:

- Thumbnails transformations performed by external TS

- Thumbnails transformations performed by local binaries in Alfresco nodes (imagemagick convert)

And in my case the first option was not working properly, so I used the second option.

Regards.

--C.

[tlapinsk]

Hi Cesar,

Thanks for clarifying your thoughts a bit more. In our case, we haven't had many issues with remote thumbnail generation. That being said, we'll keep it in mind moving forward if we do start to see problems.

Appreciate you taking the time to help troubleshoot on this one though. As Martin said above, this question isn't quite relevant for these forums due to the Remote Transformation Software being an Enterprise Product. But, it's always nice to hear from other community members regardless.

Best,

Tim