I have a requirement to assemble multiple files from client app to a single PDF file. Please let me know the best practice to achieve it through watchedfolder configuration. We have to use watched folder sue to several reasons. I have noted down some design considerations please let me know if there is a better method. Also any reference to process input.xml file will also be very helpful.
Client App:
The client app will
-> Generate a input.xml file and prepare few input files with multiple extensions like .doc, .html, .xls, .pdf etc.
-> All these files along with input.xml will be copied inside a directory (input-dir) with unique name and input-dir will be copied to the 'input' directory of ALC ES4 watched folder.
-> The app will wait for the result file to appear in the 'result' directory of ALC watched folder.
-> The result file will be named same as name of input-dir.pdf as it is a unique name and it will help to troubleshoot the environment in case of any error.
The input.xml will contain below information.
-> Header
-> Footer
-> List of file names
ALC ES4:
A process watching the folder will copy the input-dir along with all files and process it and write the output to result directory.
Flow of the process needs to be as below.
Option 1
-> Store the input-dir name to use in result PDf name
-> Read input.xml file and store header and footer values to a variable
-> Read the file list info from input.xml and convert files one by one to PDF in the same order (the order is important)
-> Prepare a variable with generated file names
-> Assemble all generated PDF files and apply header, footer information
-> Write the result PDF to 'result' directory of watched folder
Option 2
-> Store the input-dir name to use in result PDf name
-> Read input.xml file and store header and footer values to a variable
-> Read the file list info from input.xml and store it in a variable
-> Assemble all input files as package and apply header, footer information
-> All non PDF files will be automatically converted to PDF (is this available?)
-> Write the result PDF to 'result' directory of watched folder
