CS4 Asset Management

Question

Hi,
I’m having some difficulties implementing asset management in our CS4 InCopy and InDesign plugins.
I seem to have the basics right but I’m lacking some refinements.
I’ve created implementations of IAMSystemProvider, IAMServiceProvider and IAMServices for Initialize, CheckIn, CheckOut and CancelCheckOut.
Our stories and documents are stored in database, so the locked and editable status need to reflect the state of the document in the database.
When the user opens a story from database it is copied to a local store and edited in InCopy from there.
For the most part this works, the story is marked as Editing, and the user can make changes and save it back to the database.
The Links panel shows the correct file path, but there are inconsistencies.
The status is marked as Contained. I’m really not sure what this means; contained in what?
Story Status is marked as “Text Modified”, but if I close the story and check the text model, the dirty flag is not set, as I would expect and the user isn’t prompted to save. So the behaviour is correct, and I’m not really sure where the Links panel is getting this Text Modified status from if not the ITextModel.
The Managed Status is probably the worst, it shows “is available for anyone to edit”, and yet the bar across the top of the story shows Editing and most definitiely not “Available”.
How am I supposed to keep this in sync. Should the IAMService code explicitly update the Link status or does the link control panel query the IManagedStatus in some way?
The latter is what I was expecting and I’ve tried attaching an instance of an IManagedStatus implementation to the IManagableAsset during the call to the Initialize IAMService and it’s doesn’t seem to be called at all.
Is this documented somewhere, the CS3/CS4 Porting guide don't really go into this much detail, and the CS4 Programming guide doesn’t cover  asset management, that I've found in any case?
Most serious of these problems is that if I open and close three stories then InCopy crashes with no call stack!
I’m hopefully guessing that the crash is associated with the asset management being out of sync, and in any case I would like to fix that up first.
Best Regards and many thanks for any assistance that you can offer.
Caerwyn

Answer 1

See http://forums.adobe.com/thread/852571?tstart=30 for an idea of sizes available.
Here is an example of getting a thumbnail and saving it on the desktop....
#target bridge
var thumb = app.document.selections[0];
var sourceBitmap = undefined;
app.synchronousMode = true;
sourceBitmap = thumb.core.thumbnail.thumbnail; //smallest
//sourceBitmap = thumb.core.preview.preview; //next size
app.synchronousMode = false;
if( !sourceBitmap || sourceBitmap.width == undefined || sourceBitmap.width == 0 ){
    alert("Unable to get bitmap");
    }else{
var Name = decodeURI(thumb.spec.name).replace(/\.[^\.]+$/, '');
var exportFile = new File( Folder.desktop + "/" + Name + "-thumb.jpg" );
sourceBitmap.exportTo( exportFile,  100);
There are many examples of extracting metadata and it might be best to look at some of them, also download the sdk where you will find all the documentation and examples.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/bridge.html
If it looks a bit complex you could use ExifTool http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ as an alternative.