Forum Discussion

mconstantin_aras_com's avatar
mconstantin_aras_com
Creator II
3 days ago

Hello,

Aras uses PDFTron (now Apryse) for PDF generation and merging, so that's probably the first option to investigate. PDFTron supports page-level manipulation, allowing specific pages or page ranges to be extracted and merged into a new PDF.

One thing to be aware of is licensing. Using PDFTron without the appropriate license can result in watermarking of the generated PDFs.

regards

Michael

phil_macintyre_ssi-corporate_com's avatar
phil_macintyre_ssi-corporate_com
Ideator II
20 hours ago

Hi Michael,

Thank you for the suggestion.

Appreciate the heads up about licensing. We'll be sure to factor that in.

Cheers,

Phil

  • angela's avatar
    angela
    Catalyst II
    8 hours ago

    Interesting question!

    Where do your PDFs come from?
    Are they just plain PDFs?
    Or are they based on TechDocs, RE, MPP?
    Is this a common use case? Do you need it often? 

    PDFtron is super powerful! As Michael mentioned its a licened product. Aras has a license. Subscribers are allowed to use it inside Innovator context. But don´t ask me about the license details.

    If you just want to merge PDFs. Maybe use something like PDFSharp or pdf-merger-js?

    • phil_macintyre_ssi-corporate_com's avatar
      phil_macintyre_ssi-corporate_com
      Ideator II
      2 hours ago

      Hi Angela,

      Thanks for your response. For your Q's

      • The PDFs will be hosted in Aras Innovator. They might be standalone Document files (their own item type), or they could be files attached to other item types
      • They could be a mixture. Things like user manuals for technical equipment, sign-off documents (with e-signatures), staff lists, work codes, stuff like that.
      • They could come from a variety of sources but should all land as PDFs stored in Aras
      • Definitely a common use case. Our clients would be using this all the time. It might not be every user who needs it, but at least say a manager for a team being able to prepare a consolidated PDF package for their crew.


      I'll give a sample use case. We've created a new item type in our Aras called a Planning Work Package. It's designed to roll up parts that need working on, context parts to support, BOMs for procurement, related documents for support, and then suitable properties to guide the work. We enabled the Aras PDF/Image viewer, and crawl the relationships to all the related docs, grab all their files, and surface them at the work package level. So I can see all of them from the work package... but all as separate docs so it can be a little overwhelming to figure out exactly what you need.

      For a single work package, the team lead might want to go through the related docs, and pull together the following

      • the assigned team list for the work station (from 1 sheet)
      • the charge codes they need for tracking the work (coming from an MES system)
      • select pages from one of more technical manuals (for installing some equipment, or using a new tool)
      • some welding specifications (from another sheet)
      • the shipping list for where the assembled work will go next (from another sheet)


      Yes, you COULD crawl through all the related docs to find those things, but that'd be quite time consuming. It would be waaaaay more efficient for the team lead to bundle those things together and deliver them to the team, saving effort for every worker.

      So that's why not only do we want to be able to combine documents, but also to be able to pick what pages you want to include from specific documents.

      Hope that helps!

      Phil