The four changes in LiveDocx 1.1 and phpLiveDocx 1.1-20090527 are:

SSL encryption is mandatory

When SSL encryption was enabled on the LiveDocx server last month, many users wrote us expressing their appreciation. In the following days, we received more e-mail generally saying that SSL should not be an option, but mandatory. Hence, with the goal of assisting PHP users to develop secure applications, all traffic between phpLiveDocx and LiveDocx is now encrypted using SSL. SSL can no longer be deactivated.

PDF files are much smaller

Many users expressed concern about the size of PDF files, produced by phpLiveDocx. The root of this problem could be traced back to a specific PDF export filter used by the underlying technology, which powers LiveDocx. In the meantime, this issue has been fixed and the produced PDF files are now much smaller.

New merge fields are available

The backend service LiveDocx runs on a technology called TX Text Control. Recently, TX Text Control 15.0 was released, which now supports a number of new merge field types. These merge fields (listed below) are now available in LiveDocx:

• MERGEFIELD
• DATE
• IF
• INCLUDETEXT

Additionally, a new merge field is populated automatically at the end of the merge process. It contains the total number of pages in the resulting document.

• NUMPAGES

I will post some examples, which use these new merge fields in the coming days.

Unit tests with PHPUnit

To ensure the high quality of phpLiveDocx remains thought the current and all future versions, full unit testing has been added. Take a look at the directory phplivedocx/tests in the downloadable distribution file. To start the tests, ensure you have PHPUnit installed (via PEAR) and run phplivedocx/run-tests.sh. The unit tests are written against PHPUnit 3.3.16.

Update now

The latest version of phpLiveDocx is a drop in replacement for the old version. Only in the case that you explicitly turned off SSL encryption in the constructor, do you need to delete the third parameter of the constructor. Remember: SSL encryption is now mandatory!

Download phpLiveDocx.

The LiveDocx Service engineers apologize in advance from any inconvenience that this may cause.

Please refer to the original blog post in the LiveDocx Blog.

All end-users have to do, is copy the documents they wish to convert into a specific network directory (aka Hot Folder) and the files are converted in a matter of minutes into the desired format. End-users can than pick up the converted documents and process them further, send them via e-mail or to the printer.

Consider the following screenshot of a typical Windows desktop (click to enlarge). The top window is the directory, which contains the files to convert. Once they have been converted the files are moved into the middle directory. The actual converted files are saved in the bottom window.

Supported file formats

The following input file formats are supported:

• DOCX - Microsoft Word DOCX Format
• DOC - Microsoft Word DOC Format
• RTF - Rich Text File Format
• TXD - TX Text Control Format

The following output file formats are supported:

• DOCX - Microsoft Word DOCX Format
• DOC - Microsoft Word DOC Format
• RTF - Rich Text File Format
• PDF - Acrobat Portable Document Format
• TXD - TX Text Control Format
• TXT - ANSI Plain Text

Getting started

Download the current phpLiveDocx distribution file and unzip or untar the archive to your local file system. This sample application is contained in the phplivedocx/samples/mail-merge/convert-batch/ directory. If you are using phpLiveDocx for the first time, please review the Getting Started Guide.

Copy the files you want to convert into the directory queue. For your convenience, there is already a number of demonstration files in this directory.

Run the run-job.php script with the file format into which you wish to convert your documents. For example:

./run-job.php --output-format pdf

And sit back! phpLiveDocx will convert your documents.

The converted documents (i.e. the PDF versions in the above example) will be placed in the directory output.

The original document will be moved to the directory queue_done.

To get a list of supported output file formats from the command line, simply call run-job.php with no parameters:

./run-job.php

Automation with cron

If you are running Linux on your server, you can call the run-job.php script every n minutes to fully automate the task of converting documents.

If you set it up like this, all you have to do is copy the files you want to convert into the queue directory and wait for a maximum of n minutes.

Once the next cron job has been called, the documents will be converted into the desired format in the output directory.

To do this, fire up your crontab editor:

crontab -e

And add the following line to call run-job.php every 5 minutes:

*/5 * * * * cd [PATH]/phplivedocx/samples/mail-merge/convert-batch && ./run-job.php --output-format pdf | mail -a "From: [FROM_EMAIL]" -s "phpLiveDocx Batch Converter" [TO_EMAIL]

Replacing the placeholders (strings between [ and ]) with…

1. [PATH] with the path to the phpLiveDocx sample application.
2. [FROM_EMAIL] with the e-mail FROM which the cron job confirmation should be sent.
3. [TO_EMAIL] with the e-mail TO which the cron job confirmation should be sent.

cron will then execute run-job.php every five minutes and in addition sent you an e-mail report of the batch convert job to the specified e-mail address.

The final step to allow the situation, as shown in the above screenshot, is to share the three directories queue, queue_done and output with Windows clients. This can be done via Samba or any other network file system supported by Windows and/or Mac. Once the shares are in place, shortcuts to the appropriate network directories can be added to the desktop (illustrated in the right half of the screenshot).

Need help?

If you need help, please post your questions and/or comments below or in the support forum and I will assist as much as I can.

Update your projects now:

• Download phpLiveDocx
• Download Zend Framework 1.8
• Read Zend Framework 1.8 release blog

A massive thank you goes out to the Zend Framework contributers for producing such a high quality, powerful and easy to use framework with extensive corporate backing.

Updated on May 13, 2009: Zend Framework 1.8.1 was released today. The current version of phpLiveDocx has been successfully tested with Zend Framework 1.8.1.

phpLiveDocx has been tested and is fully working with the most current version of the Zend Framework.

There is, however, one fundamental change in the way auto-loading works in Zend Framework 1.8. Learn more about the class family responsible for auto-loading (Zend_Loader_Autoloader) in the official Zend Framework documentation.

As the phpLiveDocx sample applications take advantage of auto-loading, it is necessary to update two lines in the file phplivedocx/samples/common.php or download the latest distribution file, in which the changes have already been implemented.

Take a look at lines 31 and 32 of common.php:

require_once 'Zend/Loader.php';
Zend_Loader::registerAutoload();

This needs to be changed to:

require_once 'Zend/Loader/Autoloader.php';
$autoloader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();
$autoloader->registerNamespace('Tis_');

As of phplivedocx-1.0-20090428 this change has been implemented in phpLiveDocx. Should, however, you want to use previous versions of phpLiveDocx with Zend Framework 1.8, you will have to update your projects as described above.

For example, the following characters are part of the French alphabet:

À à  â Æ æ Ç ç È è É é Ê ê Ë ë Î î Ï ï Ô ô Œ œ Ù ù Û û Ü ü

While the following are part of the German alphabet:

Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü ß

When assigning strings containing any special characters to phpLiveDocx (such as those listed above), it is important that the strings be UTF-8 encoded, otherwise, an exception will be thrown.

UTF-8 is a universal character encoding, which allows all languages to be stored in one single character range.

To find out in which encoding your strings are stored, use the PHP function mb_detect_encoding(). Should mb_detect_encoding() return a value that is not UTF-8 then you need to encode your strings before assigning them to phpLiveDocx. There are several ways of doing this, but the most simple is to wrap the string you want to encode in utf8_encode().

If you are working with phpLiveDocx in an IDE that allows you to set the encoding of source code files, then set this to UTF-8 too.

I am very happy to let you know that the LiveDocx guys have just implemented this in their service and that I have also updated the Tis_Service_LiveDocx_* classes. As of phpLiveDocx version 1.0-20090421, you can now specify in the constructor whether or not to use SSL.

Connect to LiveDocx with SSL

The default is to connect with SSL:

$liveDocx = new Tis_Service_LiveDocx_MailMerge('username', 'password');

Alternatively, you can explicitly specify to use SSL (note new third parameter):

$liveDocx = new Tis_Service_LiveDocx_MailMerge('username', 'password', true);

Connect to LiveDocx without SSL

If, for whatever reason, you do not want to use SSL, specify false:

$liveDocx = new Tis_Service_LiveDocx_MailMerge('username', 'password', false);

However, please remember, if you do not use SSL, all traffic between your application and the backend service is transmitted unencrypted and potentially can be read by any man in the middle. You should therefore not allow personal or financial data to be entered into your application, if you choose to not encrypt all traffic.

You can download the current version with SSL support from the download section.

As ever, feedback and comments are welcome!

Updated on May 15, 2009: As of phpLiveDocx 1.0-200905015 all traffic with LiveDocx is over SSL. SSL may no longer be de-activated. The third parameter of the constructor, as described above, has been removed again.

Some of the new features, which are available in the new version of TX Text Control, will also be available in LiveDocx and consequently phpLiveDocx.

New merge fields

The next version of LiveDocx will support three new merge fields: IF, DATE and INCLUDETEXT.

The IF field can be used to compare a specific field value with an expression in order to insert a “true text” or a “false text”. This is very useful, if you want to hide information based on a specific field value.

The DATE inserts the current date, in a user-specified format.

For example, the format dddd, MMMM d would insert:

Saturday, November 26

Or the format h:mm am/pm, dddd, MMMM d would insert:

10:00 AM, Saturday, November 26

The INCLUDETEXT field can be used to insert the text and graphics contained in the named document. The format of the document is recognized based on the file extension and can be uploaded to the LiveDocx server like all other templates.

PDF import

By far one of the coolest new features in TX Text Control 15.0 is PDF import. PDF import will be integrated in to LiveDocx, thus allowing users to convert PDF files into editable MS Word documents including images, fonts and text positions.

Boilerplate

The LiveDocx guys are thinking about services to convert documents and/or assemble documents from text boilerplates.

Trial version

A LiveDocx trial version is planned so that you can test LiveDocx in your own server environment (requires IIS server).

LiveDocx management tool

The LiveDocx guys are planning to provide a tool for the management of databases, user accounts and templates.

Feedback wanted!

As ever, we are actively collecting ideas for future LiveDocx versions. Please post your opinion and what you would like to see in the Feature Requests LiveDocx Forum.

• Support Forum
  Forum to request technical support.

• Feature Request Forum
  Forum for to request new features.

If you have a question which fits into either of these two categories, I would like to ask you to post your comments into the forum. I will answer all posts as quickly as possible. This way, other people, who have the same question will also benefit.

The last two events were excellent opportunities to hear leading speakers in the web development field and of course to participate in the sessions themselves.

This year, the organization team is making considerable effort to publish all information about the unconference in English, with the goal of attracting an even more international audience.

The event’s blog is at:
http://www.php-unconference.de

And its Twitter feed here:
http://twitter.com/phpunconference

Tickets for the event cost only EUR 25.00. This includes entry to both conference days, food and drinks. In comparison to other PHP conferences, it is an absolute bargain and the quality of the presentations is just as high. Tickets are selling out very quickly, so register today at:
http://de.amiando.com/phpunconference.html

(Students of the Hamburg University get in free! See this post.)

After successful registration, you can download the entry ticket. Mine is below. See you there!