Technical FAQs for "PrizmDoc"

How can I determine what version of PrizmDoc Viewer my server is running?

To check the server version, make a GET request to:

http://localhost:18681/PCCIS/V1/Service/Current/Info

You can make a get request by navigating to the URL in your browser. The JSON response will have a "pccisVersion" property, which is the version number you are looking for. A similar GET to the following URL will determine the PAS version:

http://localhost:3000/info

The JSON response’s "version" property is what you are looking for. Keep in mind that differing version numbers don’t necessarily indicate a mismatch, as long as the major and minor version numbers sync-up. For example, the PCCIS version 13.5.33.5696 and PAS version 13.5.0000.1816 are from the same release (13.5).

What file formats does PrizmDoc Viewer currently support?

Please refer to our latest documentation for the most up-to-date list of supported file formats:

• Supported File Formats

For documentation on older versions of PrizmDoc Viewer, please see our documentation archive.

I would like to be able to query my PrizmDoc Server for all documents currently in a state of processing. I want to be able to do this to determine if a document is “hanging” during conversion, to determine my system’s efficiency (My RAM and CPU are at X% with ten documents converting), or for other tasks. This is currently possible for individual processes if you know the process ID. Is this possible for all processes?

The current version of PrizmDoc does not have an API to determine if any file is currently converting on PrizmDoc Server. PrizmDoc provides viewingPackageCreator, contentConverter, redactionCreator, and markupBurner APIs that report the status of a specific process, and whether it is in progress or not. However, it is currently necessary to know a specific processId to obtain that information.

There is an active Feature Request for this item available for viewing here.

Is it possible to only use PrizmDoc on an internal network? Does the product make attempts to connect to sites that are on the Internet? Does it try to reach Accusoft?

The only cases where PrizmDoc must be connected to the Internet are as follows:

• If you are running the PLU in online mode.
• If your PrizmDoc deployment uses cloud licensing. In this case, PrizmDoc requires Internet access to get to the S3 bucket.

Beyond these cases, PrizmDoc can be installed on an internal network and used normally.

Can PrizmDoc handle password-protected files, such as PDFs or Excel files?
How would a user specify a password for a particular document?

It is possible to specify the password for a password-protected document when creating a viewing session in PrizmDoc. When sending a request to create a viewing session, you’ll use the password field in the request body to specify the password. For example…

POST http://localhost:3000/ViewingSession
Content-Type: application/json
{
    "source": {
        "type": "url",
        "url": "https://www.usability.gov/sites/default/files/creating-wireframes.pdf"
    },
    "password": "hunter2"
}

(Replace "hunter2" with the actual password)

Please note that even if a file needs a password and is not provided one (or is provided one that’s incorrect), the viewing session should still be created successfully. The easiest method to determine whether the password is needed/correct is to make a call to get the page. You can do this by making a GET request to the GetPage route using the viewingSessionId created earlier, like so…

GET pas_base_url/Page/q/0?DocumentID=u{viewingSessionId}

…be sure to replace pas_base_url with the root of your Prizm Application Services (PAS) instance (usually this is http://localhost:3000) and replace {viewingSessionId} with the actual value for viewingSessionId created in the previous step.

The above call will return 200 OK if the page load is successful. If a password is required/incorrect, you should see a return status code 480. There will be additional response headers called accusoft-status-number and accusoft-status-message, which should be 4001 and "Document requires a password", respectively.

You can see the above in greater detail in the product documentation here.

You can use this information to re-create a viewing session with the correct password.

Currently, there is a feature request planned for a potential future release of PrizmDoc to prompt the user for a password if one is required.

Can we give network paths for source document location as well?

For example //10.216.2.312/test/test.doc

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#Transfer_Your_Document_to_PrizmDoc_Server.html.

When using http URL, for security reasons, only absolute paths are allowed, but could you map test to documents and use a local file?

Documents are stored by default in:

C:\ProgramData\Accusoft\Prizm\Documents 

so if the type in the request for source is document it will look in that folder. The configuration for that is set in PAS config:

    {
        "source": {
            "type": "document",
            "fileName": "1040ez.pdf"
        }
    }

When I click on the download button a ‘download options’ pane appears to the left of the Viewer.

Is there a way I can modify the client code such that clicking the download button skips this step and just downloads the document as a PDF, burning in all the marks/redactions/e-signatures?

To clear the event listener for the download button and attach your own, you can add this in your client-side JavaScript after the Viewer has been initialized:

$("button.pcc-icon.pcc-icon-download").off("click");

$("button.pcc-icon.pcc-icon-download").on("click", function (event) {
    $("div.pcc-select-download div.pcc-label").html("PDF");
    $("div[data-pcc-checkbox=\"burnMarks\"]").addClass("pcc-checked");
    $("button[data-pcc-download=\"download\"]").click();
});

This will add a new click listener to the download button. In the example above, the click listener sets download parameters (type is set to “PDF”, and marks/redactions/esignatures are included), and then immediately calls the click event on the “download” button that would normally be in the download pane. This should make it so that when the user clicks the download button, the notification dialog immediately appears instead of the download pane, as shown below:

From here the user can click the “save” button to download the resultant document.

I am trying to retrieve documents and files to view in PrizmDoc Viewer. The files are located in a NAS device. The file server is available via an HTTP link but I would prefer not to use the HTTP put method.

A NAS device is short for Network Attached Storage. Typically, to access these devices would be no different than a shared network drive from a server.

You can setup Prizm Application Services (PAS) to point to a NAS device, if there are actual file shares set up on that device. Also, a key note to remember is that both PrizmDoc and PAS should be running with a domain id which has full access to that share so that the services can access the files when called.

For instance, you have a folder on the NAS device called PrizmFolders and it is shared with a network drive share of \mynasdevice\PrizmFolders. You can modify the pcc.win.yml file to point to that root folder by updating the document.path as outlined below. Keep in mind that the backslashes have to be escaped so you will need an extra backslash for each backslash in the path:

documents.path:"\\\\mynasdevice\\PrizmFolders"

Once this is done, when posting a viewing session through PAS, you can simply specify the subfolder\filename. For instance, if there was a folder called northregion and a file called metrics.pdf (\mynasdevice\PrizmFolders\northregion\metrics.pdf) you would be able to specify northregeion\metrics.pdf in the post command.

When viewing documents using Internet Explorer 11, we are noticing an abnormally high CPU utilization. It gets worse when zooming in up to 800% through the PrizmDoc Viewer. It only seems to happen on certain machines. Why might this be happening?

A possible factor for this type of performance issue can potentially be corrected by enabling Internet Explorer’s hardware acceleration feature.

This feature can be enabled or disabled with the following steps:

1. Open Internet Explorer 11, click on the Tools icon, and select Internet Options.
2. Navigate to the Advanced tab and enable the Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering option.
3. Click Apply and restart the browser.

Which databases types are supported by PrizmDoc for storing annotation/redaction layers as well as viewing package information?

PrizmDoc provides the option to store viewing package process and creation information, as well as annotation layer JSON information, into a database.

Currently, Microsoft SQL Sever and MySQL is supported for this type of storage. For more information on setting up a database for use with PrizmDoc, please refer to the following documentation:

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#run-database-scripts.html.

https://help.accusoft.com/PrizmDoc/latest/HTML/webframe.html#developer-guide.html.

We are running PrizmDoc on a Windows operating system and we noticed that our ms-office-conversion-service remained unhealthy even through a restart of the service. We also noticed an error in the MsOfficeConverter.log referencing the following error. What could be the cause?

“WARN – COM error occurs on 1 initialization attempt. Retrieving the
COM class factory for component with CLSID
{000209FF-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following
error: 80080005 Server execution failed (Exception from HRESULT:
0x80080005 (CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE))”

The PrizmDoc MSO feature requires either Microsoft Office 2013 or 2016 to be installed in order to function properly. Based on the error, there is a Microsoft Office specific .dll file which is not registered properly.

The following process will re-register the .dll files and potentially resolve this issue (Note: for Step 2, this may vary depending on what directory you used to install Microsoft Office and the version of Office. You want to find the directory containing winword.exe):

1. Run Command Prompt as Admin.
2. Type cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15 or cd C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16
3. Run winword.exe -regserver.
4. Reboot the server.

If you don’t have the Prizm service set up to run on boot then make sure that Office applications are started by PrizmDoc, or from the command line, before being opened manually.

When deleting a Viewing Session, does the backend conversion stop?

No, the backend conversion will continue even after a Viewing Session is deleted.