Technical FAQs

Question

Can PrizmDoc handle password-protected files, such as PDFs or Excel files?
How would a user specify a password for a particular document?

Answer

It is possible to specify the password for a password-protected document when creating a viewing session in PrizmDoc. When sending a request to create a viewing session, you’ll use the password field in the request body to specify the password. For example…

POST http://localhost:3000/ViewingSession
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "source": {
        "type": "url",
        "url": "https://www.usability.gov/sites/default/files/creating-wireframes.pdf"
    },
    "password": "hunter2"
}

(Replace "hunter2" with the actual password)

Please note that even if a file needs a password and is not provided one (or is provided one that’s incorrect), the viewing session should still be created successfully. The easiest method to determine whether the password is needed/correct is to make a call to get the page. You can do this by making a GET request to the GetPage route using the viewingSessionId created earlier, like so…

GET pas_base_url/Page/q/0?DocumentID=u{viewingSessionId}

…be sure to replace pas_base_url with the root of your Prizm Application Services (PAS) instance (usually this is http://localhost:3000) and replace {viewingSessionId} with the actual value for viewingSessionId created in the previous step.

The above call will return 200 OK if the page load is successful. If a password is required/incorrect, you should see a return status code 480. There will be additional response headers called accusoft-status-number and accusoft-status-message, which should be 4001 and "Document requires a password", respectively.

You can see the above in greater detail in the product documentation here.

You can use this information to re-create a viewing session with the correct password.

Currently, there is a feature request planned for a potential future release of PrizmDoc to prompt the user for a password if one is required.

Banks and financial technology (fintech) companies commonly use document life-cycle management solutions to make their back-office functions run more smoothly. To take full advantage of these systems, organizations must be able to transform documents into a format they can work with.

Question

How can I tell which server has the cache for a specific document in a clustered PrizmDoc environment?

Answer

When a document is viewed, it creates a Viewing Session ID. That Viewing Session ID has information regarding which server in the cluster is doing the work, however, it is encoded and cannot be read directly.

In order to determine which PrizmDoc cluster server is doing the work for a specific document in a specific viewing session, you can do a text search for the Viewing Session ID in the plb.sep_multi.log on all servers. Only one server in the cluster will be a match for that Viewing Session ID.

Question

After searching a document, an error icon appears in the search results panel. Clicking on it displays the following error message: “x page(s) cannot be searched.” Why does this occur and how can I find out which specific pages couldn’t be searched?

Answer

When the PrizmDoc Viewer text-service cannot find any text for a given page in the document, it provides an array of all the pages without text in the response from searchTask results.

In short, the document is fine and simply contains pages without text. If you look at the pagesWithoutText array contained within the response data from searchTasks, you’ll see something like this:

[0, 1, 7, 17, 43, 45, 65, 67, 77, 79,…]

The values reported are pages that do not contain any text but instead are either blank or contain an image. This data can then be used to inform the user of how many pages are not searchable.

By default, the Cells Server will use internal storage which is only suitable for evaluation and development. When deploying to a production environment, best results come from configuring the server to use enterprise level storage (S3) versus filesystem.

Question

How do I use a Network Drive path for Image and ART storage in my ImageGear .NET web application?

Answer

In an ImageGear .NET web application, you have to define the location of the images and annotations directory in the storageRootPath and artStorageRootPath configuration property.
In the current version of ImageGear .NET, the storageRootPath and artStorageRootPath do not work with a network drive path \\SERVER-NAME\sharefilename.

The workaround for this would be to create a Symbolic link from a local directory to the network drive directory.

  • To create a symbolic link: Open “Command Prompt” as Administrator and type in > mklink /d "local path" \\SERVER-NAME\sharefilename
  • Pass in the path of the symbolic link as image or art storage root path in your web.config: storageRootPath="local path" artStorageRootPath="local path"
Question

How do I use a Network Drive path for Image and ART storage in my ImageGear .NET web application?

Answer

In an ImageGear .NET web application, you have to define the location of the images and annotations directory in the storageRootPath and artStorageRootPath configuration property.
In the current version of ImageGear .NET, the storageRootPath and artStorageRootPath do not work with a network drive path \\SERVER-NAME\sharefilename.

The workaround for this would be to create a Symbolic link from a local directory to the network drive directory.

  • To create a symbolic link: Open “Command Prompt” as Administrator and type in > mklink /d "local path" \\SERVER-NAME\sharefilename
  • Pass in the path of the symbolic link as image or art storage root path in your web.config: storageRootPath="local path" artStorageRootPath="local path"
Question

We are interested to know how well the cloud offering
scales. For example, can we process thousands of transactions per second? Is there a limit to the number of transactions that we can use
concurrently?

Answer

The limitation will vary depending on the size of the documents and the type of work being performed on them.

PrizmDoc Cloud utilizes AWS servers to scale our services as demand increases, and we do currently rate limit total requests which should not exceed 100 requests within an eight second window. The window is rechecked every four seconds to determine if the rate limit is still in excess.

Question

Can I use all of the features and configuration options in PrizmDoc Cloud-Hosted that I can in PrizmDoc Self-Hosted?

Answer

Currently, PrizmDoc Cloud does not allow for editing the server central configuration parameters, but the defaults have been set to allow for more complex documents that might otherwise fail in order to account for the lack of ability to modify these options.