Effortlessly design and manage document workflows

This allows definition and editing of a job definition, using a tree-list type model coupled with a Visual Studio – style property list. The different step types are listed on the left under the Designer Task group box. The step types have been grouped into sub categories, each step type will have its own icon. Drag and drop can be used to allow reordering of steps.

Menu items

Fields

Filter file option

Job scheduling

To use the Job Schedule, you will need to click the Schedule tab under the Designer Tab.

The product supports three types of scheduling which are implemented via the DAS service:

Ad-hoc

This means that the job does not have any fixed schedule, but maybe explicitly run via the management GUI or via one of the API methods.

Watched folder / Continuous scheduling

This allows the job to be scheduled to run periodically between a start time and end time each day. The periods may be seconds, minutes, or hours. For example, a job may be specified to run every 30 seconds between 9:00 and 17:00.

If you check the “Run Continuously” checkbox, the job will run for 24 hours a day. This option is the default for all continuous jobs.

Daily scheduling

This allows the job to be scheduled to run at a specified time each day.

Alerts

This allows you to send Emails to your mailbox when the job is successful or fails, to get to the Alerts tab, you will need to click the Alerts tab under the Designer Tab.

Note: You will need to enter your SMTP setting in the Modules and Options tab before the email alerts will work properly.

Alert variables

When sending emails, there are several variables that can be used to customize the alerts you send out, these variables are enclosed by two percent signs %%. DAS will replace any occurrences of the variables with an appropriate value at run time. The table below shows the possible variables that can be used.

Workflow Processing versus In-Place Processing

DAS is designed as a Workflow product where there is an input folder and an output folder. At the end of the process, there are options to copy, delete or move the input files that have been successfully processed.

With “in-place” processing, the input documents are turned into searchable PDFs and returned to the same location. It is possible to replace the existing file if the output file format produces the same file name. The input files can be copied to an archive location if they need to be kept (this is recommended during the development process and during testing – if this is not set, the original file cannot be recovered).

DAS can be used for in-place processing, but we have an OCR product named Document Searchability that is designed specifically for in-place conversions to searchable PDFs, it may handle this Use-Case more effectively. Searchlight records all the files it processes, so is more efficient when there are a lot of files, as they do not need to be opened to be identified as previously processed.

Example in-place job setup

The job shown below will convert PDFs under the tree “C:\ADX Demo\Documents” to searchable PDFs, processing up to 5 files each time the job is run.

The Source Folder and the Target Folder must be the same.

The Use Work Folders check box must be checked when processing in place. A message will be displayed when the folders are set to the same location in the UI and the check box set automatically.

Select the Process Sub-Folders check box.

For Audit Purposes, the Input Files option should be set to Copy to archive after Processing.

To avoid re-processing files, select the Include Unprocessed PDFs Only – with Document Count Limit option in the Filter Files combo box.

Because the Filter Files option selected includes the Document Count Limit, the Batch Size of the job can be set to 5 files per run (You can increase this to a suitable batch size).

The Output file Name is set in the Conversion Settings for the step and should be configured to **%FILENAME.pdf** so that it will replace the input file.

Step types

This section explains each of the step types.

DAS Server edition is licensed to use Standard and GDPicture steps. The Extended edition adds the Extended OCR steps.

Image to searchable PDF

This step can be found under the OCR Expander. It creates a searchable PDF file from input image types e.g. .png, .tiff, .jpg, .gif, .bmp.

Depending upon the Step Type Properties chosen, a separate text, HTML and Office files may be produced from the OCR process.

This step is not available for the GDPicture engine; however, it can be replicated by using a combination of the Convert Any File To PDF (GdPicture) and PDF To Searchable PDF (GdPicture) steps

Standard engine

Extended engine

PDF to searchable PDF

Creates a searchable PDF file from the set of images from an image-only PDF file.

Depending upon the Step Type Properties chosen, a separate text, HTML and Office files may be produced from the OCR process.

Standard engine

Extended engine

Merge TIFFs to PDF

This step first merges the input images in a folder into a multi-page PDF file, then performs an OCR on the file. Depending upon the Step Type Properties chosen, a separate text, HTML and Office files may be produced from the OCR process.

Standard engine

Convert any file to PDF

This converts any printable document to PDF, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, etc. subject to the native application being available on the server. See ToPDF (BCL easyPDF) for more details.

Set PDF properties

This is used to set PDF Metadata properties (such as Author, Title, etc.), Security settings and Document Display properties.

Custom script

This can be used to support a custom scripted step in the process. See Scripting Custom Steps for more details.

Stamp PDF files

This step can be used to add stamps to PDF pages, we have given the user the ability to customize these stamps extensively in a very simple manner. See the step properties below.

Stamp variables

The table below shows different Stamp variables supported by DAS. The idea is that DAS will replace an occurrence of the variable with the appropriate value in a text string before applying the stamp. For example, to Stamp Today is Monday on a PDF page, use the following Stamp variable “Today is %A”.

| Variable | Stamp | | -------- | ------------------------------------------------------ | --- | | %a | Short Day (Mon) | | %A | Long Day (Monday) | | %b | Short Month (Jan) | | %B | Long Month (January) | | %c | Date and time (30 October 2013 17:21) | | %C | Date and Time with seconds (30 October 2013 17:21:50) | | %d | Month and Year (October 2013) | | %D | Day and Month (30 October) | | %e | Short Year (13) | | %E | Long Year (2013) | | %f | Short Time of Day (17:21) | | %F | Time of Day with Seconds (17:21:20) | | %G | Full Date and time (Wed, 30 October 2013 17:21:50 GMT) | | %Y | File Name |     |

Merge PDF

Merges a folder of PDF files into a single file.

Split PDF

Splits each input PDF file into a set of files, either a single page per file or by page ranges.

Merge TIFFs

Merges a folder of TIFF files into a single file.

Split TIFF

Splits each input TIFF file into a set of files, either a single page per file or by page ranges.

Read inbox

This can read mailboxes and extract attachments using IMAP4 or OAuth2 (Modern) Authentication, in accordance with the parameters specified below. Use of this step type requires a Server License.

Check with your System Administrator and ensure the following for IMAP4:

• IMAP4 is enabled for the mail server and your account.

• You have the IMAP address of the mail server.

For OAuth2, you require an access token from the Microsoft Identity Platform, which will supply you with the credentials to use our email steps with Modern Authentication.

Note: The files will be downloaded in the following format, name@timestamp@[email protected] where:

• name = Filename

• timestamp= Date of the email

• email= ‘From’ address

Example: file1@[email protected]@[email protected]

Send documents

Use of this step type requires a Server License. Attachment limit is 50MB but email provider’s limits are normally lower.

Note: The input file of this step must be in the format of name@timestamp@[email protected]

where:

• name = Filename

• timestamp= date of the email

• email= the address where we will send the output files

Example: file1@[email protected]@[email protected]

Convert PDF to TIFF

Rasterizes a PDF file, converting into a multi-page TIFF file.

Extract text from PDF

Extracts the raw text from a searchable PDF.

Note:

• This does not perform an OCR process, it just extracts the existing text from the PDF file.
• There is a GDPicture based step (PDF to Text).

SharePoint download

This step downloads documents from the specified SharePoint document library ready for processing.

SharePoint upload

This step uploads documents to the specified SharePoint document library.

Azure storage download

This step will download files to your local machine from an Azure storage Container.

Azure storage upload

This step will upload files from your local machine to an Azure storage Container.

Create XML property file

This step takes a PDF input file and generates an XML output file.

Optimize PDF

This allows the creation of Web Optimized (Linearize) PDFs.

OCR any file to PDF

This step attempts to convert all files to searchable PDFs, DAS may have the following OCR engines.

• Standard Engine

• GdPicture Engine

• Extended Engine

See Standard OCR vs Extended OCR(opens in a new tab) for the differences.

Standard engine

Extended engine

Barcode TIFF/PDF

This step can detect barcodes in TIFF/PDF files and either Split/Rename the file based on the barcodes detected.

High availability

The high availability step in DAS is designed to utilize two instances of the product running on separate hosts.

Distributed polling

This step can be used to implement load balancing in DAS. It achieves this by copying a fraction of the files from a central input location to the local system where DAS is running. Multiple DAS servers can point to one input folder, as a result, the files will be shared across several servers and the processing will be more optimized. See Distributed Polling for more details.

DAS content extraction job

This step allows a DAS Content Extraction job to be integrated as an DAS step. See DAS Content Extraction Job Step for more details.

PDF to PDFA job

This step uses GDPicture libraries to convert a PDF document to a PDFA format.

PDF recognition to JSON job

This step extracts important data from PDF files in the form of key/value pairs. Users can define their expected keys and easily retrieve the data from those fields. No templates are needed.

Modern compress PDF

This step uses GDPicture libraries to compress PDF documents with various options.

Validate PDFA

This step uses GdPicture libraries to validate if the input PDF document conforms to the selected PDFA version.

Linearize PDF

This step uses GdPicture libraries to optimize PDFs for web-viewing, rendering the document one page at a time.

Convert any file to PDF (GdPicture)

This step uses GdPicture libraries to convert a large variety of file types to PDF. This step does not require an Office installation to process Office files.

Combine any file to PDF

This step uses GDPicture libraries to convert a large variety of file types to PDF, and then merges them to create a single output PDF. This step does not require an Office installation to process Office files.

Combine PDFs

This step uses GDPicture libraries to convert a large variety of file types to PDF, and then merges them to create a single output PDF. This step does not require an Office installation to process Office files.

PDF to JPEG/PDF to PNG/ PDF to Tiff

These steps use GDPicture libraries to convert PDF files into the JPEG, PNG or TIFF format.

PDF to text

This step uses GDPicture libraries to extract the searchable text from the pages of a PDF file, and creates an output text file. If the page is non-searchable, there is the option to enable OCR.

PDF to searchable PDF (GdPicture)

This step uses GDPicture libraries to carry out Optical Character Recognition on the input PDF, creating an invisible searchable text layer over the document.

PDF portfolio

This step uses GDPicture libraries to combine a folder of files into an integrated PDF unit. There are a wide range of file types that can be used to create the PDF Portfolio.

Smart redaction

This step uses GDPicture libraries to identify and redact selected sensitive information in the input document.

Detect signatures

This step uses GDPicture libraries to identify pdf documents that contain digital signatures.

Any step that alters a digitally signed PDF will invalidate that PDF’s signature. This step allows signed files to be identified, and either copied or moved to a specified folder so the signature can be preserved.

If the Copy option is selected, the original signed file can also be attached to the copy that is processed. This means that the original is attached to the file that can be subsequently processed.

Key value pair extraction

This step uses the GDPicture engine to extract information about key-value pairs in pdf document. The extra information included can be the Key or Value Bounding Box, Page Number, Confidence, and Data Type.

The user can also use JSON file to declare Expected Keys. These specific keys will be added to a separate output file if a value is found. Synonyms can also be declared for each Expected Key, so that a match for any of the synonyms will be counted as a match for the Expected Key. An example is below.

For example, we have used total and invoice number as the expected keys. grand total is a synonym for ‘total’, and there are two synonyms for invoice number in invoice no and inv no.

[

{

"expectedKey":"total",

"synonyms":\["grand total"\]

},

{

"expectedKey":"invoice number",

"synonyms":\["invoice no", "inv no"\]

}

]

CSV output warning

CSV is a format commonly used by spreadsheet programs. These programs commonly transform numerical data or formula, and will save these transformations, overwriting the original data. To prevent these transformations, we add an apostrophe to the start of any possible transformations.

For example, the phone number +44 115 496 0999 will appear as ‘+44 115 496 0999 in the CSV only.

The transformations are listed below.

• Formula - these are generally for values that begin with +, -, =, or @, we add an apostrophe at the beginning for the CSV output. This prevents the CSV from producing unintended formulas and functions from these values.

• Dates/Times – this covers many cases of date and time formats, as data can often be mistaken as a date or time, and then irreversibly transformed.

• Long Numbers – this covers numbers that are 11 digits or longer, as they are transformed to decimal notation

We recommend removing the apostrophes when extracting the data. This only affects CSV output, so it may be easier to extract data from the other formats if possible.

Pattern redaction/pattern highlight

These steps use GDPicture libraries to identify and redact sensitive information (Redaction) or highlight important information (Highlight) in the input document based on a regular expression or terms list.

Split PDF (GdPicture)

This step uses GDPicture libraries to split PDF files based on the ranges, bookmarks, or into single pages.

Split PDF by barcode

This step uses GDPicture libraries to identify different barcode types in a PDF, and split the PDF document at each instance of a barcode.

Pattern enumeration

This step uses GdPicture libraries to identify terms and/or a pattern, and it’ll produce a report based on the frequency of each term.

Get document information

This step uses GdPicture libraries to produce a report on the number of PDF pages that are searchable vs. an image. It’ll also calculate how many searchable pages are visible text pages vs. hidden text layer.

Convert PDF to office

This step uses GdPicture libraries to convert PDF input files to various Office output formats, including .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, and .svg.

Convert any file to office

This step uses GdPicture libraries to convert various input file types to various Office output formats, including .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, and .svg. Not all file conversions are supported.

Step type properties

Each of the Step Types referred to in the previous section will have a set of properties such as that shown below for “Convert any File to PDF”. Each property has a description associated with it which is displayed when the property is highlighted.

To look for a property, you can either use the scroll bar on the right-hand side or the search bar at the top. The search bar looks for an exact match of the text that you type but will offer suggestions that start with the text you have currently typed. Selecting a suggestion will jump you to the property and select it for editing.