Technical FAQs

Question

I am receiving a 401 Unauthorized when trying to use PrizmDoc Cloud. What could be the issue?

Answer

This error is likely the result of neglecting to specify your API key.

To fix this, specify your API key in the headers of your request to create a viewing session.

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Question

How do I store and retrieve documents in subdirectories of the configured documents directory in PrizmDoc PAS?

Answer

You can retrieve documents from subdirectories when dealing with local files. Simply pass the subfolder in the fileName parameter when creating the viewing session. You can test this by manually placing a document inside a subfolder and making the following POST request:

`http://localhost:3000/ViewingSession`

    {
        "source": {
            "type": "document"
            "fileName": "folder/document.pdf"
        }
    }
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Question

When viewing .csv files in PrizmDoc Viewer, the dates in the CSV file are in UK format (DD/MM/YYYY). However, if the DD is lower than 13 it is converted to US date format (MM/DD/YYYY).

Answer

Workaround:

The suggested workaround is to use Excel files instead of CSV to avoid this situation. Excel file format stores date/time format in the file.

Issue:

This is a bug in the MS Excel COM Interop that is being used by the product (MsOfficeConverter). Here is the related Excel bug: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/82248560-dabd-4c90-b1e2-793b2f32b257/excel-bug-handling-dates-in-csv-files-using-microsoftofficeinteropexcel?forum=exceldev

Problem description:

When using MS Excel Interop to open CSV files, all date/times there are being interpreted with “en-US” locale, regardless of actual system locale. Here is the description from the bug link above:

Excel interpreting dates when its reads csv files via .NET Interop. It is not a excel formatting issue per say. When excel accesses information such as dates (which are stored as numbers in memory to support arithmetic operations) from text files, it has to convert the date from textual representation (within the csv file, such as 2012-09-12) to the equivalent number in Excel memory (e.g. 41164 which represents 2012-09-12). When we use Interop to access this number in memory, many are interpreted incorrectly – swapping days with months and vice versa. This is a bug, as Excel is not abiding by the system culture on interpreting local date formats.

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Emerging legal technology
 

Ongoing Legal Digital Transformation

There are many challenges facing the legal industry that legal tech and new emerging legal technology can help solve, but getting firms to adopt new technology to address these challenges can be a hurdle.  But the most recent challenge within the eDiscovery process is compounding them all. 

The Arrival of New eDiscovery Challenges

The change to a remote/hybrid work environment starting in 2020 during the worldwide COVID pandemic transformed the working world. Even while some companies have returned to the physical workspace, hybrid and fully remote working conditions continue to exist. This means that the collaborative working social platforms and mobile apps we all used to communicate and work with (Teams, Slack, Zoom, Webex, WhatsApp, Google Meet, etc.) are here to stay. 

Regardless of whether employees are in-office, hybrid, or working remotely, using these collaborative working social platforms has become the new norm. This has had profound effects on legal firms performing eDiscovery, most of whom still depend on tools and review processes designed for paper documents and email. The process of collecting, viewing, searching, redacting, and collaborating across traditional documents and emails has pivoted, and firms are responsible to include the digitized content from these collaborative working social platforms in their eDiscovery.

Compounding the Problem

Processing this new collaborative working social content is a big enough challenge on its own. Unfortunately, many in the legal industry weren’t fully optimized with their digital transformation by adopting previously available legal tech. While some traditional eDiscovery tools have reached maturity and are being utilized by firms, many slower-to-adopt firms are still fighting internally to have legal tech implemented.

How can firms (both early adopters and those still in the digital transformation process) prepare for eDiscovery across these new platforms filled with chat streams, emojis, and video recordings?

Enter Third-Party Software Integrations

Legal tech providers can be assured that there is technology available that can support their eDiscovery across these collaborative working social platforms. But better still, they don’t need to build a solution from scratch. 

Readily available and easy to adopt, third-party software integrations allow developers to add the capabilities they need without disrupting development timelines or building features from scratch. The ability to view, search, annotate, and redact content within documents securely inside an existing application, without sacrificing the everyday functionality is powerful.

By supporting legal firms and their technology service providers with software integrations that offer ease of use, customization, security, and next-level support, they will be well placed to take on these new eDiscovery challenges.

Take on Your eDiscovery Challenges with Accusoft

Accusoft software integrations help law firms, legal departments, and their respective technology providers build a more productive process for case review and eDiscovery. With unique technology that enables easy digital document processing, manual processes like redaction and search are no longer labor-intensive. Accusoft’s digital document lifecycle technologies streamline collaboration and information-sharing while keeping files secure.

Looking specifically to address the new challenges of processing new collaborative working platform content within your eDiscovery process? Accusoft’s solutions can view these new collaborative platform transcript file types (including JSON, VTT, DOCX), but also search, redact and offer secure collaboration directly inside your application.

To learn more about how Accusoft integrations can support your legal digital transformation and eDiscovery challenges, talk to one of our technology experts today.

_ _ _

Accusoft is attending the LegalWeek 2023 event in NYC, are you? Come visit our booth #2304 and discover software to manage your documents better.

For more information on Accusoft’s software integrations for eDiscovery and case management applications, visit our Legal industries page.

 

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On July 12, 2022, Accusoft announced the latest update to PrizmDoc, its industry-leading document processing integration. The PrizmDoc 13.21 update improves existing features and adds key functionality related to format support, redaction capabilities, content conversion, and more, allowing developers to offer enhanced functionality within their applications. 

One of the main improvements in this release is to PrizmDoc’s Content Conversion Service (CCS). PrizmDoc now provides the ability to convert PDF documents to MS Word (DOCX) documents, making shared collaboration easier than ever before.

Other features and updates in this release include: 

  • High-Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF, HEIC) support for viewing, redaction, and conversion to JPG/JPEG, PDF, PNG, SVG and TIFF. 
  • PrizmDoc Viewer Markup Burner API now provides the ability to burn in redaction reason text for transparent (draft mode) redactions and provides the ability to remove PDF AcroForm fields. 
  • Improved performance of the PAS GET MarkupLayers API when using AWS S3 storage, which significantly reduces network traffic between PAS and S3.

PrizmDoc provides customizable document processing to help developers deliver in-browser document creation, editing, and collaboration functionality, to enhance their software applications.

For more information about PrizmDoc or to download a free trial, please visit our website.

About Accusoft: 

Founded in 1991, Accusoft is a software development company specializing in document processing, conversion, and automation solutions. From out-of-the-box and configurable applications to APIs built for developers, Accusoft software enables users to solve their most complex workflow challenges and gain insights from content in any format, on any device. Backed by 40 patents, the company’s flagship products, including OnTask, PrizmDoc™ Viewer, and ImageGear, are designed to improve productivity, provide actionable data, and deliver results that matter. The Accusoft team is dedicated to continuous innovation through customer-centric product development, new version release, and a passion for understanding industry trends that drive consumer demand. Visit us at www.accusoft.com.

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View this introduction to PrizmDoc and the benefits it can deliver for your web-based application. In this webinar, you will learn:

  • About PrizmDoc’s capabilities for document viewing, conversion, search, annotation, redaction, editing, and its many other document processing functions
  • The benefits of integrating this industry-leading collection of REST APIs into your application
  • How others have benefitted from integrating PrizmDoc into their applications
  • How easy it is for you to get started with PrizmDoc
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Question

I am trying to retrieve documents and files to view in PrizmDoc Viewer. The files are located in a NAS device. The file server is available via an HTTP link but I would prefer not to use the HTTP put method.

Answer

A NAS device is short for Network Attached Storage. Typically, to access these devices would be no different than a shared network drive from a server.

You can setup Prizm Application Services (PAS) to point to a NAS device, if there are actual file shares set up on that device. Also, a key note to remember is that both PrizmDoc and PAS should be running with a domain id which has full access to that share so that the services can access the files when called.

For instance, you have a folder on the NAS device called PrizmFolders and it is shared with a network drive share of \mynasdevice\PrizmFolders. You can modify the pcc.win.yml file to point to that root folder by updating the document.path as outlined below. Keep in mind that the backslashes have to be escaped so you will need an extra backslash for each backslash in the path:

documents.path:"\\\\mynasdevice\\PrizmFolders"

Once this is done, when posting a viewing session through PAS, you can simply specify the subfolder\filename. For instance, if there was a folder called northregion and a file called metrics.pdf (\mynasdevice\PrizmFolders\northregion\metrics.pdf) you would be able to specify northregeion\metrics.pdf in the post command.

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Question

ImageGear .NET v24.6 added support for viewing PDF documents with XFA content. I’m using v24.8, and upon trying to open an XFA PDF, I get a SEHException for some reason…

SEHException

Why might this be happening?

Answer

One reason could be because you need to execute the following lines after initializing the PDF component, and prior to loading an XFA PDF:

// Allow opening of PDF documents that contain XFA form data.
IImGearFormat pdfFormat = ImGearFileFormats.Filters.Get(ImGearFormats.PDF);
pdfFormat.Parameters.GetByName("XFAAllowed").Value = true;

This will enable XFA PDFs to be opened by the ImageGear .NET toolkit.

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Question

How can I get a document’s dimensions with PrizmDoc?

Answer

There are two methods you can use to do this with PrizmDoc:

The first method is using the requestPageAttributes() method from ViewerControl. This method allows you to get the width and height of a page in the document in pixels. Below is sample code on how to use requestPageAttributes() to get the attributes of page 1 of a document:

viewerControl.requestPageAttributes(1).then(function(attributes) {
    var pageWidth = attributes.width;
    var pageHeight = attributes.height;
});

The second method is done by making a GET request to the PrizmDoc server to get metadata for a page of the source document in a viewing session. The request is: 

GET /PCCIS/V1/Page/q/{{PageNumber}}/Attributes?DocumentID=u{{viewingSessionId}}&ContentType={{ContentType}}

The content type needs to be set to “png” for raster content and “svgb” for SVG content. The request returns the data in a JSON object containing the image’s width and height. The units for the width and height are in pixels when the contentType is set to “png” and unspecified units when the content type is set to “svgb”.

The request also returns the horizontal and vertical resolution of raster content when the content type is set to “png”. This information is similar to pixels per inch, but the units are unspecified, so if you wanted to calculate the size of the document you can calculate it by width divided by horizontal resolution or height divided by vertical resolution. The resolution is hard-coded to 90 when contentType is set to “svgb”.

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