Dynamic Document Generator

Provides the following merging and conversion Smart Services:

PDF from DOCX
- Convert multiple DOCX files into a single PDF. Please note that the translation from DOCX to PDF is not always 1:1. The template may need to be tweaked or simplified to achieve the desired results.
PDF from XSL-FO Transformation
- Uses XSLT to convert an XML to XSL-FO which is then converted to PDF
PDF from HTML
- Converts an HTML document into a single page PDF.
PDF from HTML Transformation
- Uses XSLT to convert an XML to HTML which is then converted to PDF
Text Doc from XSLT
- Uses XSLT to convert an XML to a plain text document (such as HTML, another XML doc, etc).
DOCX from XHTML
- Converts a valid XHTML file into a DOCX. Useful for creating dynamic documents that are editable.
DOCX Merge
- Merges one or more DOCX files together. If a header or footer exists in any document, they will be removed during the merge process.
- A configurable separator can be specified: none, line break or page break

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Top Comments

kethaj 3 months ago +1

Hi We are using PDF from HTML smart service and it was working fine till 18.4 version. and it stopped working after 19.1 upgrade. I have checked with Appian support team and they confirmed that error...

Mike Schmitt 1 month ago in reply to Sylvain Furt

Sorry - Community apparently doesn't auto-notify about replies here, so I never saw your followup questions
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himanshun39 1 month ago

Hi, while we upgraded from 18.4 to 19.1, the PDF from HTLM stopped working. We recently deployed the upgraded plugin version (1.7.2), however this smart service still does not provide the required output. The process is stuck at the node and then errors out after some time. The only details we find in logs are "2019-07-01 13:02:14,509 [ajp-nio-8009-exec-2232] ERROR com.appiancorp.common.struts.BaseAction - Error executing action: Could not initialize class javax.swing.RepaintManager java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class javax.swing.RepaintManager "
Can you help with this issue?
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Ilan Gold 2 months ago
For anyone using DOCX from XHTML a few useful notes for you:
- To access MS Word standard styles (like Title, Heading1, Normal, etc.) format your HTML body as so
 
 Title Example: Your Title Here
 
 Heading1 Example: Heading Text
 
 Basically the point being is that you should us tags for all of your text and specify the formatting class as the class
 
 This will allow MS Word to register the style for the navigation pane
- It's worth noting that although MS Word identifies the style applied to text, it will not use the default style of MS Word (this tripped me up for a while)
 
 You should create a document in word with some styles applied and save as an HTML and grab the relevant CSS style definitions out of the CSS and put it in a constant or something that you add to the <head> of your HTML by default
 
 Make sure that you set your CSS class names to p.<msWordStyle> (eg: p.Title, p.Heading1, etc.)
 
 This will allow your class to both be recognized by MS Word and will allow you to apply a style to the text so that it looks decent on openning the document
 
 It's also worth noting that the CSS created by MS Word has non-standard tags in it generally of the format "mso-style..."
 
 You can remove these as they won't do anything for you and will just take up space
- Also remember the main difference between XHTML and HTML is that all attributes must have "" around them!!!
Happy document generation everyone!
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Sylvain Furt 2 months ago in reply to michalh

The plugin does not do anything special to handle fonts. It uses the Apache FOP classes to initiate the parsing and transformation. Please look at the class XmlFoConverter inside the plugin for more details.

I would suggest to do some research on how to handle fonts with Apache FOP transformation and either update the XSLT stylesheet or update the plugin code.
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michalh 2 months ago

Hi, using PDF from XSL-FO Transformation gives us good resulting outputs but there is issue with fonts where the plugin does not react to font set inside XSLT (Georgia) and output is each time in Times font. Is there some solution / workaround?
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Sylvain Furt 3 months ago in reply to himanshun39

It appears that it was an issue with the plugin framework, not the plugin itself. Our engineering department released a hotfix to address this.

Please create a support case to request the latest hotfix to be installed.
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himanshun39 3 months ago in reply to Sylvain Furt

Sylvain FurtWith recent migration to 19.1 we are also facing this issue. Ours is a cloud platform and this is failing at all the environments. The plugin version is v1.4.1. Please let me know if there is any update available for this plugin.
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stephenm588 3 months ago in reply to stephenm588

.... any suggestions?
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stephenm588 3 months ago

Hello, we are experiencing issues with this plugin in our Production environment only (unable to recreate in lower environments).
(http-0.0.0.0:8080-6) 2019-05-02 12:22:06,668 [http-0.0.0.0:8080-6] ERROR com.appiancorp.process.engine.UnattendedJavaActivityRequest - An error occurred while executing activity: id=268446013, classname=com.appiancorp.ps.xmlfo.ss.PdfFromDocx3
2019-05-02 12:22:06,690 INFO [stdout] (http-0.0.0.0:8080-6) com.appiancorp.suiteapi.process.exceptions.SmartServiceException: org.docx4j.openpackaging.exceptions.Docx4JException: Exception exporting package
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Sylvain Furt 3 months ago in reply to Sylvain Furt

Cloud vs On-premise?

Dev/Test/Production?

Version of the plugin?
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Sylvain Furt 3 months ago in reply to Sylvain Furt

Mike - could you please provide me more info about the environment?
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Sylvain Furt 3 months ago in reply to Mike Schmitt

Let me look into this
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Mike Schmitt 3 months ago in reply to kethaj

PDF from HTML has stopped working for us also since the 19.1 upgrade. Has anyone been able to find more information on this yet? Sylvain Furt?

2019-05-01 16:33:36,676 [ThreadPoolTaskExecutor-16815] ERROR com.appiancorp.process.workpoller.WorkItemListener - The following exception occurred while attempting to complete work item [(WorkId: 383, WorkType: {Process Id:740474,Point Id:163774} Activity Metadata:{Id:163774,ACPs:{ActivityClassParameter[name=HtmlDocument,it=13,v=674956],ActivityClassParameter[name=CreateNewDocument,it=26,v=1],ActivityClassParameter[name=NewDocumentName,it=3,v=Test PDF from HTML (new)],ActivityClassParameter[name=NewDocumentDesc,it=3,v=],ActivityClassParameter[name=SaveInFolder,it=12,v=279579],ActivityClassParameter[name=ExistingDocument,it=13,v=<null>],ActivityClassParameter[name=PauseOnError,it=26,v=1]},ARVs:{ActivityReturnVariable[name=ErrorOccurred,it=26,v=<null>],ActivityReturnVariable[name=ErrorText,it=3,v=],ActivityReturnVariable[name=NewDocumentCreated,it=13,v=<null>]}}, Response: null, ServerName: execution00)] - Exception: 
javax.resource.spi.work.WorkCompletedException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class javax.swing.RepaintManager
	at org.springframework.jca.work.SimpleTaskWorkManager$DelegatingWorkAdapter.run(SimpleTaskWorkManager.java:247)
	at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1149)
	at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:624)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748)
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class javax.swing.RepaintManager
	at javax.swing.JComponent.repaint(JComponent.java:4792)
	at java.awt.Component.repaint(Component.java:3311)
	...

kethaj 3 months ago in reply to kethaj

adding error log for the above issue -

It appears that the relevant error is: javax.resource.spi.work.WorkCompletedException: java.awt.AWTError: Assistive Technology not found: org.GNOME.Accessibility.AtkWrapper at org.springframework.jca.work.SimpleTaskWorkManager$DelegatingWorkAdapter.run(SimpleTaskWorkManager.java:247) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1149) at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:624) at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:748) Caused by: java.awt.AWTError: Assistive Technology not found: org.GNOME.Accessibility.AtkWrapper at java.awt.Toolkit.loadAssistiveTechnologies(Toolkit.java:807) at java.awt.Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit(Toolkit.java:886) at javax.swing.RepaintManager.<clinit>(RepaintManager.java:238) at javax.swing.JComponent.repaint(JComponent.java:4792) at java.awt.Component.repaint(Component.java:3311) at javax.swing.text.JTextComponent.setEditable(JTextComponent.java:1758) at javax.swing.text.JTextComponent.<init>(JTextComponent.java:309) at javax.swing.JEditorPane.<init>(JEditorPane.java:196) at com.appiancorp.ps.xmlfo.util.XmlFoConverter.fromHtmlToPdf(XmlFoConverter.java:127) at com.appiancorp.ps.xmlfo.ss.PdfFromHtml.runSmartService(PdfFromHtml.java:30) ... ... 3 more Exception in thread "ThreadPoolTaskExecutor-6028" java.awt.AWTError: Assistive Technology not found: org.GNOME.Accessibility.AtkWrapper You will need to follow up with the creator of the plugin to get this resolved, as the issue appears to be with the plugin itself. The status for this case has been changed to Pending User by Tristan Newmann. 15 April 2019 11:32 PM
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kethaj 3 months ago

Hi We are using PDF from HTML smart service and it was working fine till 18.4 version. and it stopped working after 19.1 upgrade. I have checked with Appian support team and they confirmed that error due to plugin issue and asked me to check with plugin author.
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