Scenario: a development server, a release server and many production customers' servers: nothing more classic.

Every time a change is deployed on the release server, the best thing would be to "push" it automatically on production server, or as soon as possible (at least).

Recently we faced a performance issue on a Plone site, which has been reported to be slower than expected.

The application, after a migration to a new hardware, has shown to be a bit lazy compared to the expectations.

Because of the weird behaviour and confident on our Plone installation, we assumed a hardware misconfiguration.
But without evidence (numbers in this case), a claim is merely an opinion.

So, to get ride of the problem, we decided to perform multiple load test on different servers, and then compare the results.

In this scenario, we have a odf template to merge with data.

Working in the Lotus Domino environment, one way to achieve this goal could be a server-side component invoked by an XPagdies, to make the casting process: first, I need something in Java that could do the job for me, and after some search I came across XDocReport.

XDocReport means XML Document reporting

XDocReport provides Java API to merge XML document created with MS Office (docx, pptx) or OpenOffice (odt), LibreOffice (odt) with a Java model to generate report and convert it in another format (PDF, XHTML...).

Basicly, to make the template, main steps are:

1. create a template document with MS Word (docx) or OpenOffice (odt, ods)
2. compose the body of the document itself with variables to fill in
3. use Velocity or Freemarker syntax to set variables to replace.

In this case, I opted to use Velocity inside an ODF file.

Now let's start by explaining how to set up the whole project.

Installing server libraries

External libraries (.jar) that serve the purpose have been installed in the installation directory of the Domino server (jvm/lib/ext path).

These are the files:

commons-collections-3.2.1.jar
commons-lang-2.4.jar
fr.opensagres.xdocreport.converter-1.0.0.jar
fr.opensagres.xdocreport.converter.odt.odfdom-1.0.0.jar
fr.opensagres.xdocreport.core-1.0.0.jar
fr.opensagres.xdocreport.document-1.0.0.jar
fr.opensagres.xdocreport.document.odt-1.0.0.jar
fr.opensagres.xdocreport.itext.extension-1.0.0.jar
fr.opensagres.xdocreport.template-1.0.0.jar
fr.opensagres.xdocreport.template.velocity-1.0.0.jar
itext-2.1.7.jar
odfdom-java-0.8.7.jar
org.odftoolkit.odfdom.converter-0.9.0.jar
org.odftoolkit.odfdom.converter.core-1.0.0.jar
org.odftoolkit.odfdom.converter.pdf-1.0.0.jar
org.odftoolkit.odfdom.converter.xhtml-1.0.0.jar
oro-2.0.8.jar
velocity-1.7.jar

Dont' forget an important security setting in java.policy file:

Server-side tools

To manage the whole process I used an HTML page with a button that calls (via Ajax) an XPages, that deals with the fusion of the data (HTML string) in the template. At the end, I create the PDF file using iText libraries.

Related to XPages, it only call the servlet in the afterPageLoad event:

com.redturtle.XDocReport.mergeAndPDF(
	facesContext.getExternalContext().getRequest(), 
	facesContext.getExternalContext().getResponse()
);

This is how it looks the package, which includes the servlet:

Finally, this is the servlet code:

package com.redturtle;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.io.PrintWriter;

import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

import org.odftoolkit.odfdom.converter.pdf.PdfConverter;
import org.odftoolkit.odfdom.converter.pdf.PdfOptions;
import org.odftoolkit.odfdom.doc.OdfTextDocument;

import fr.opensagres.xdocreport.core.document.SyntaxKind;
import fr.opensagres.xdocreport.document.IXDocReport;
import fr.opensagres.xdocreport.document.registry.XDocReportRegistry;
import fr.opensagres.xdocreport.template.IContext;
import fr.opensagres.xdocreport.template.TemplateEngineKind;
import fr.opensagres.xdocreport.template.formatter.FieldsMetadata;

import lotus.domino.NotesException;
import lotus.domino.Session;

public class XDocReport {

	private static String VERSION = "XDocReport Version 1.0.0";
	static PrintWriter outClass = null;
	private static Session session = null;

	public static void mergeAndPDF (HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException, ServletException, InterruptedException, NotesException {

                // NO DIIOP
		session=DominoAccess.getCurrentSession();
		try {			
			// 1) Load ODT file by filling Velocity template engine
			InputStream in = new FileInputStream("/tmp/template.odt");

			IXDocReport report = XDocReportRegistry.getRegistry().loadReport(in,TemplateEngineKind.Velocity);

			FieldsMetadata metadata = report.createFieldsMetadata();
			metadata.addFieldAsTextStyling("comments",SyntaxKind.Html,false);

			// 2) Create context Java model
			IContext context = report.createContext();
			context.put("comments", "<b>hello world</b>");
			
			// 3) Generate report by merging Java model with the ODT
			OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(new File("/tmp/ODTProjectWithVelocity_Out.odt"));
			report.process(context, out);

			// 1) Load ODT into ODFDOM OdfTextDocument 
			in= new FileInputStream(new File("/tmp/ODTProjectWithVelocity_Out.odt"));
			OdfTextDocument document = OdfTextDocument.loadDocument(in);

			// 2) Prepare Pdf options
			PdfOptions options = PdfOptions.create();
			
			// 3) Convert OdfTextDocument to PDF via IText
			out = new FileOutputStream(new  File("/tmp/ODTProjectWithVelocityList_Out.pdf"));
			PdfConverter.getInstance().convert(document, out, options);
 
                        // Only manage response to Ajax call
		        response.setContentType("text/plain");
		        response.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
			outClass = new PrintWriter(response.getWriter());
			printAgent("OK");
			return;
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (Exception e) {
			// TODO Auto-generated catch block
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
	}

	protected static void printAgent(String string) {
		outClass.println(string);
	}
}

Pay attention to these points:

1. comments - variable name inside ODF template
2. metadata.addFieldAsTextStyling("comments",SyntaxKind.Html,false); - fill variable with something in HTML syntax
3. <b>hello world</b> - HTML string to merge

NOTE: DominoAccess and JSFUtil are two very helpful classes written by Karsten Lehmann: see the full code. Thanks to them, DIIOP process for communication is not required.

Pro & Cons.

I think that it's a very powerful approach; the only limitation I've found is the restricted set of styles supported by the merge process (see there for details). Feel free to make some test using this approach, and let me know what you think :-)

This is a rather technical post, full of code. Faint of hearth you are advised!

The story

Not all the content types are designed from the beginning with a container behaviour, a feature that can become a requirement in consequence of specification changes.

It happened also to me and in my case I had to deal with dexterity based content types. I started googling around and found this unresolved question on the dexterity mailing list.

Starting from the suggestions in the thread, I managed to find out a nifty solution that reveals some interesting aspects of the software we work with.

Nothing to do with the Mayan prophecies, quiet!

Some time ago I came across a tweet that talked about Meteor and, as usual, I tried to investigate the simple reading.

Meteor runs on Node.js. Has it's own server