Docentric Toolkit 3.1 released
A new version of Docentric Toolkit has been released. This new release contains the following improvements:
PDF output performance improvement
Generation of PDF and XPS documents has been drastically improved. We made a lot of optimizations mostly in the pagination module and those of you using Docentric Toolkit for conversion from Word to PDF documents or use Docentric Toolkit Reporting tool to generate PDF or XPS documents will benefit a lot. Performance gains will vary from case to case and will heavily depend on the content of the input document. Gains are visible most in larger textual documents where we have measured even more than 10x faster document creation than before.
We conducted a small test where we were converting DOCX documents to PDF by using the Document.Load and the Document.Save methods. The test measured conversion duration of several documents. Conversions were run for several different documents using Docentric Toolkit v3.0 and the new, Docenetric Toolkit v3.1. The table below shows the test results and performance gains for three test documents:
| # | Document Content | v3.0 Duration [ms] | v3.1 Duration [ms] | Gain Factor |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 18 pages 10000 words |
18,113 | 1,312 | 13.8 |
| 2 | 3 pages 5 tables, 10 pictures |
1,309 | 975 | 1.34 |
| 3 | 37 pages Lots of tables and large pictures, 3000 words |
8,132 | 4,470 | 1.82 |
The conclusion is that performance gains are biggest for the textual documents and much less for documents containing large images. If you are using Docentric Toolkit for bussiness document automation, then you should consider upgrading to Docentric Toolkit v3.1.
Add-In user experience improvements
The Add-In has been added a new feature that increases RAD (Rapid Application Development) factor. With the new version 3.1, all the schema (tree) views in the Add-In are now searchable, which will reduce template development time when dealing with large data source schemas.
Consider the following example. Let’s say we want to create a “Sales Order” template document. The Sales Order schema is relatively large and contains more than 100 data fields. Our template will contain more than 30 tagging elements, which means that we will need to bind each one to its corresponding data field using Binding Control. This is perfectly fine when a data source schema contains up to 30 data fields. But picking the right one from the list of 100 data fields and repeating the process for all 30 tagging elements will most problably involve a lot of scrolling and manual searching since not all data-fields will be visible at once inside Binding Control:
In the previous versions of Docentric Tookit we would probably spend a lot of time inside Binding Control trying to find and pick the right data field. With the new version 3.1 this has changed and from now on you will be able to find a data field by simply typing the start characters of the data field name. Let’s say we want to bind a FIELD tagging element to the VATNum data field. As soon the Binding Control opens, we can initiate search by starting to type the beginning characters of the target data field name. By pressing (the first) “V” key, we get automatically positioned to the first data field node that starts with “V” which in our case is already the data field we are searching for:
In order to confirm the selected data field and close the Binding Control we simply press the Enter key two times. In case the VATNum data field would not be the first occurance that starts with “V”, we could simply type more starting characters to get a better match. Or we could simply navigate to our target data field by pressing the Up/Down key.
This Search behavior is available in the Schema Tree on the Data Source pane, the Quick Builder’s schema tree view and the schema tree view inside Binding Control.
You can download the new version of Docentric Toolkit from our standard Download page. Don’t forget to give us feedback!
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