Drawings as PDF - Quick way to download them?

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
May 11, 2010
95 replies
33905 views

I have my drawings being published as a PDF by my Pro/e CAD worker. This is fine but in the end my users really need to be able to quickly download or email the PDF. Currently the only way to get the PDF out is to do the following:
1- Go to Drawing Details Page
2- Select "Display Representations List"
3- Click Actions>Save Representation
4- Save Representation out as .zip file to desktop
5- Extract PDF from .zip file and email etc

WAY to much work...does anyone know of a more efficient way to do this?

Other

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avillanueva

23-Emerald I

This does not convert to PDF right? Just downloads the plot (HPGL/2) or
PDF if they exists as representations. Correct?

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cadjett

1-Visitor

Correct, it only downloads an existing representation of the selected DRW.

I imagine something could be written to convert a plt to pdf, but then there are so many abobe installations for plt2pdf out there, it would be hard to write for any or all.

But then again, some one in the past sent me code to use PDFCreator & convert plt. I think command line also.

Let em go look for that code. PDFCreator is an easy one to download & install. Then maybe they add a site.xconf entry for PDFCreator install location, etc

Letme look into that. Of course when free time allows...ha..ha

L Jett

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cadjett

1-Visitor

Back to the drawing board. I went to a windchill page outside the vmware & ran the download PDF & it placed it on the windchill server "C:\temp" & not the machine where wc web page was ran from. I should have seen that coming, but you cant see it all, until you get more time to test & error check. No errors, but poor functionality.

But this might be an easy fix, but its not coming to me right now.

Otherwise, now the code is only good if there is a shared drive used to download to.

I probably need to use the same code in wc that allows user to select local drive:/folder. Like "download primary content", etc.

Unless some one has ran into this & knows the code adjustment. I do have some old java code for file/folder chooser, but that probably wont work in here.

But I didnt want to spend too much more free time. So I did the quick route.

But then again, I gota small buzz when it actually worked last night. So maybe I can run on that & keep the drive going to find out how to download to local drive:/folder.

Any ideas?

L Jett
datajett@aol.com, cadjett@aol.com

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SteveVinyard

Author

1-Visitor

Larry this is cool stuff. How does it work? Can you send a screenshot of it.

Steve Vinyard
Application Engineer

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cadjett

1-Visitor

Hey Steve (ALL),

I have attached a doc that has a few screen captures, along with a little explanation.

But the program still needs to be changed to offer the user to select the download location.

Now if certain networks have a user share/mapped drive, the JSP can be changed to drop the PDF/PLT to that shared/mapped drive & users can pull the PDF's from there. Now simultaneous downloads will overwrite each other, but thats an issue that is resolved by obtaining the PDF/PLT as you download it.

But I hope to update the code over the week end or sooner.

L Jett
cadjett@aol.com,datajett@aol.com

1_Download_PDF_or_PLT.doc

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SteveVinyard

Author

1-Visitor

Wow, imagine if you are an everyday user of the system and not an engineer. Plenty of people really need access to PDF's of things so they can send them out or archive them somewhere. As of now there is just no way to do it.

How hard would it be to have the PLT's automatically converted into a PDF? I know you can setup drawings to automatically convert to PDF but then I think you lose the markup abilities of the plot file unless you have the "PDF Markup" license and software from PTC. Anyone else have ideas on that?

Steve Vinyard
Application Engineer

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cadjett

1-Visitor

Hey Steve (ALL),

I now havethe codewhere it will save to client machine. I have had several email suggestions & code& they were great.

2 suggested stream to client & 1 of those sent code. Thanks.

I will probably update my code to provide that option later, but for now my code allows 2 options: Drop to SERVER or client side.

The client side drop is through hyperlink in JSP page, after selecting EPMDoc actions menu option.

To control which is used, you mainly change JSP String value:

dlLoc = "URL";
String conType = "pdf";

URL (for dlLoc) can be changed to server side folder (such as C\\:TEMP) or shared folder (accessible by user & their client machines,such asshared Z:\\PDFs or ???).

dlRep.java contains: URL url = data.getViewContentURL(holder);

This gathers wc string to open in web browser through hyperlink (href), which in turn prompts user (save window) for location to download the DRW representation.

I like this option because its allows user to place pdf/plt where they want. If they dont want that extra step, the wc admin can set dlLoc string to folder. The admin could actually have 2 actions drop downs, 1 for client, 1 for server.

"pdf" or "plt" can be set as value for String conType, depending on whether your firm publishes DRW to PDF or default HPGL/PLT.
I can maybe later have code to run PDFCreator convert plt to pdf & dump in set or determined location. But not right now. I need a break &/or different task.

I have attached an updated zip with new readme, jsp, java & class.

It probably does not do enough error checking, but please contact me if you see what I should add.

If you can, Steve or ALL, please add to your dev/test server & let me know if it works or not. Then any suggestions are welcome.

I do appreciate the emails, suggestions & code & will probably update the code to offer many options later:

Server, shared, browser or direct to client machine with stream. Either by properties or jsp page selections.

L Jett
cadjett@aol.com,datajett@aol.com