Invoking Indesign server plugin through script

Hello,
I have built a Indesign server plugin which was made to run with desktop Indesign application also. I wrote a javascript in which an event was fired. Plugin was supposed to handle the event. When I run this javascript, desktop plugin gets invoked rather than the server plugin.
I don't know the way by which an Indesign server plugin gets invoked.
Please help me getting aware of the flow it follows.
Thanks,

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How to use external DLLs in InDesign server plugin

Hi,
I am working on a project, which is having dependency on libxml2 library. I compiled the code on 64 bit Windows platform and using InDesign server 64 bit version. I put the required DLLs in Adobe InDesign CS6 Server x64 folder(with other DLLs). But now my plugin is not loading in server and also not throwing any error message on command prompt.
If I remove the libxml2's method call, then plugin is loading successfully.
Is there any other way to use external DLL or I am missing something?
Thanks & Regards,
Harsh

Hi Sidharth,
If you are using web dynpro DC perspective then you need to follow the following points to use the external jar files in it.
1. Create a external library project.
2. copy the external jars in the library folder os the projects.
3.) Select all the jars from the u201CLibrariesu201D folder, Right click and then select Development Component and click on Add to Public Part
4.Select the first Radio Button (Provides an API)and give some nameto it.
5. Repeat the step no 3 but now select the second radio button other than as selected in step no 4.
6. Now build your lirary DC.
7. Now create a j2ee DC project.
8. ) Expand the node DC Definition and Right Click on Used DC. Select Add Used DC.
9. Select the External Library DC with build time dependency.
10.Right click on the J2EE DC and then select Development Component followed by Build
11. Right click on the J2EE DC and then select Development Component followed by Deploy
now you can use both the libary DC and the j2ee DC in your web dynpro DC as used DC.
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hope this will help
regards
Narendra
Edited by: Narendra Singh on Oct 27, 2009 11:22 AM

[CS5] InDesign Server holding onto script file after being executed?

Hello,
I've run into a scenario which we have a script file dynamically created, saved to disk, then sent to InDesign Server to be executed. The code that tells InDesign Server to execute the script will delete that script file after it's finished executing. This works MOST of the time. However, sometimes, we get IO Execeptions stating that the file cannot be deleted because it is still in use. It would appear that InDesign Server is possibly holding onto the script files maybe even for just a millisecond after it's finished executing.
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-lhanneman

UPDATE:
It appears that this problem is related to IDS executing the script. I've narrowed the problem down by taking the script execution completely out of the equation. If my code saves the script to disk and attempts to delete it right after - it works every time. I'm also able to, within our .NET code, save the script to disk, open the file up, read a line out, close it, and then immediately delete it. ONLY when ID Server executes that script between writing the file and deleting the file do we have problems.
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after some hours of digging with no luck and starting to think of dirty workarounds, I decided to ask
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i donno if this question is really trivial or if i'm just approaching this the wrong way. I need to develop a plugin that i'll have to run using indesign server. I have been reading the sdk documentations and trying to understand whatever i can. I've also developed the writefishprice plugin, however from what i understand that one won't run in the server. Is there any documentation that i can read that'll get me started on this, right now i feel like i'm between a rock and a hard place. any help will be greatly appreciated.
thanks,
Paul

Hello,
Even I have developed an Indesign server plugin, but I also face the problem in its invokation. I have read " indesign-server-plugin-techniques.pdf". It talks about how to make your plugin so as to make it compatible with indesign server, but doesn't talks about how does the server plugin gets invoked??
Kindly help.

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Who can give me some information on a number of learning Indesign Server Data?
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How do I install Mavericks without invoking the OSX Server Plugin?

How do I perfrom a clean install of Mavericks from the Recovery Partition without it automatically installing, and then invoking or executing the OSX Server Plugin that ultimately results in rendering open directory operable as well as the server. I have ignored this continously, but the other day I went into the terminal and typed ARP -s that lists the shortname for the host of my MacBook Pro and it gave a totally different name than what I had given it in the wi-fi network interface under the WINS tab. More importantly, I do not want to install open directory nor the osx server plugin as it opens up more complexity than I want to deal with. Any suggestions is greatly appreciated. BTW, below are the steps I performed for installing Mavericks.
1. Powered on the MacBook Pro and then hit the Option key.
2. This took me into the Recovery Partition, whereby I went into the Disk Util and erased or formatted the hard-drive.
3. I then clicked out of the Disk Utility and went into the Recovery Mode by clicking on reinstall the current OS.
4. I went through all the prompts and the system downloaded a current version of Mavericks.
5. After completion, I turned on my Macbook Pro and went through the prompts to install Mavericks.
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iinvoking the components as described above?

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Creating a TOC via script on InDesign Server [CS5.5]

I have been struggling for about two weeks with trying to figure out how to script the creation of a TOC and an index for a book. I've successfully created the book, and have also been able to create the table of contents, however I cannot place the contents in the book. From the UI it's simple because it loads up the cursor with the TOC contents. But in script, it simply provides an array with a single Story object.
I have no idea how to make the story appear in my document. Here's my current code:
var book = app.open("book.indb");
var doc = app.open("table_of_contents.indd");
var tocStyle = doc.tocStyles.firstItem();
var stories = doc.createTOC(tocStyle, true, book, ["1in", "1in"], false, doc.layers.firstItem());
When I hit that final line, I get the following error:
Invalid value for parameter 'destinationLayer' of method 'createTOC'. Expected Layer, but received Layer.
Okay... so, if it's expecting a Layer and I'm providing a Layer - what gives?
Originally I had figured that I:
Had to create a TOC document from a template which contains a single text frame that automatically flows from page-to-page (using a master)
Add the document to the book at the beginning
Copy the contents of the Story into the TextFrame
Iterate the Lines collection of the Story, copying the paragraph and character styles for each line
This works, but it's no longer a TOCStory type. I would like to maintain the TOCStory type and just have the content flowed into the new document which I add. This makes sense, logically, but I know that nothing in InDesign is really that logical. It seems to be a lot of collection manipulations, but I cannot figure out which collections to manipulate.
The Index.generate() method seems so much more logical because the first argument is where to place the content. If it were only that simple for the TOC! If you've had experience doing this, please let me in on the secret... I don't have access to the menu items so I cannot invoke actions. Those threads don't seem to apply for InDesign Server (and that makes sense, since it's headless)
Thanks,
- Brett

Hi Brett,
here is the code that worked for me.
Michael
var bk=app.books.add(File("C:/Users/wwadmin/Desktop/testbook.indb"));
for(i=0; i<5; i++){
var doc=app.documents.add()
var page=doc.pages.firstItem()
var frame=page.textFrames.add({geometricBounds:[0,0,'10in','10in']})
frame.contents="Hello World!!!!!";
var style=doc.paragraphStyles.add({name:"Body"});
frame.paragraphs.firstItem().appliedParagraphStyle=style;
doc.save(new File("C:/Users/wwadmin/Desktop/doc"+i+".indd"))
bk.bookContents.add(File("C:/Users/wwadmin/Desktop/doc"+i+".indd"));
var doc=app.documents.add();
var page=doc.pages.firstItem();
style=doc.paragraphStyles.add({name:"Body"})
tocstyle=doc.tocStyles.add({name:"myStyle"});
tocstyle.tocStyleEntries.add({formatStyle:style, name:style.name});
doc.save(new File("C:/Users/wwadmin/Desktop/test.indd"))
bk.bookContents.add(File("C:/Users/wwadmin/Desktop/test.indd"));
doc.createTOC(tocstyle, true, bk, undefined, true, doc.layers.firstItem())
bk.save()
for(a=app.documents.length-1; a>(-1); a--){
app.documents[a].save(File(app.documents[a].fullName));
app.documents[a].close();
bk.close()

Font's...manage through indesign server or os?

Hi,
I'm just getting started with InDesign Server, and working with packaged .indd file (i.e all elements in a nice folder structure).
My question is, if i'm uploading a new package onto my server, and want to use the fonts for that artwork, do I need to manually, or through some form of automation add the fonts to the windows server, or is there a function in the InDesign Server that deals with importing / loading fonts?
Any help much appreciated!
Many thanks,
Brett

You're pretty close, the outlined steps could work. Of course you'd have to add some more postprocessing steps - add or remove pages dependent on your conditional sections, let InDesign rebuild the index if you need one, eventually optimize the layout beyond the automatically maintained keep options.
With that number of produced documents your topmost issue will be speed. For that reason I'd try to not use IDML and outside processing - to open an existing document is much faster than to import it from IDML, and if you can reuse the same template document without close-open, it will be even faster. InDesign has many features such as conditional text, text variables, counters that could be utilized. Your script would then work straight on the document object model, given an input such as tab delimited text or xml.
It is possible to communicate from .net applications with InDesign, but here you should also run comparisons with VBScript and ExtendScript which both have the advantage to run within the InDesign process. There are also other advantages of VBScript and ExtendScript - controlling InDesign can be a bit inconvenient for strongly typed languages like C#, even though it is doable. The community and thus possible support is larger for ExtendScript.
Output will work in all mentioned formats. You might get along with a PDF-only workflow, but as you mentioned the print supplier may have special requirements.
Dirk

Visual Studio compiling 64 Bit Plugin for InDesign Server CS5

Hello guys,
Again I have a problem compiling 64 bit plugins, but this time in windows environments, the 32 bit compiling works fine (also on 64 bit machines). The first thing I've done was creating a new project configuration for 64 bit environments copying the 32 bit settings. Now I changed the precompiled libraries to use the 64 bit ones and changed the output directories. After that the compilation process completed without errors, but the resource files have not been copied to the output directory (the directory for them has been created, but it remains empty). Adding the created plugin into the servers directory ends up with a server message that the plugin could not be recognized. Have I missed something that is necessary for compiling 64 bit plugins?
I'm using the 64 Bit Developer Version of the indesign server CS5. The operating system is a Windows Server 2008 x64 R2 with Visual Studio 2008.
Thanks!
P.S. a plugin compiled with 32 bit settings (including 32 bit libraries) also works for the 64 bit version of the server, so does it make any difference if I'm using 32 bit or 64 bit libraries?

The libraries were all correct (all using 64-bit). The problem was a pathing issue. libxml2 needs iconv.dll, but it couldn't find the 64-bit version that I built. Once it found it, everything worked correctly.
The funny thing about depends.exe is that it isn't right all the time. For example, if you open one of the 64-bit .aip files that ships with Illustrator (rename it to .dll first), you'll see what I'm talking about. It complains that you're mixing x86 and x64 CPU types, even though you're not.
The program I used to discover my issue is Process Monitor (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx). I've been using it for years and love it.

InDesign server crashes every time when calling deleteEmptyPages in script

We are evaluting InDesign Server CS6 on a Windows server environment. We have an idml file, sample xml file that is tagged to specific frames inside the idml file and a script file for execution on the server. This script opens the idml file using the app.open api, imports the xml file and export the ID file to a PDF. Because we have table content with variable row count, we are using the smart text reflow functionality. Setting the text preferences with smart text reflow appears to be working but we also want to delete the empty second page when the content is less than a page. So, we also tried using the deleteEmptyPages property document's textPreferences. When this is set to true and the script is executed on the ID server using the sampleclient, the server crashes with the following message. When I do the same thing in the InDesign UI using the preferences options, it works as expected.
The script looks like below - is this the right way to do it?
var myInddFile = app.scriptArgs.get("idfile"); //"X:/IDFiles/AutoFlow.indd";
var myXmlFile = app.scriptArgs.get("xmlfile"); //"X:/IDFiles/deleteme.xml";
var myOutputOptions = "[Smallest File Size]";
var myPDFPreset = app.pdfExportPresets.itemByName(myOutputOptions);
var myDoc = app.open (File(myInddFile), OpenOptions.OPEN_COPY);
myDoc.xmlImportPreferences.ignoreWhitespace = true;
myDoc.textPreferences.smartTextReflow = true;
//myDoc.textPreferences.addPages = AddPageOptions.END_OF_STORY;
//myDoc.textPreferences.limitToMasterTextFrames = true;
myDoc.importXML (File(myXmlFile));
//uncommenting this line causes the ID server to crash
//myDoc.textPreferences.deleteEmptyPages = true;
var myOutputFile = app.scriptArgs.get("outputfile");//File("X:/IDFiles/sampleX.pdf")
myDoc.exportFile (ExportFormat.PDF_TYPE,myOutputFile, myPDFPreset)

Thanks Harbs. We are looking at full automation and so removing the pages manually is not an option. But I did find a script at InTools http://in-tools.com/article/scripts-blog/script-of-the-day-jan-24-2010/ that helps with automating the removal of empty pages. This script appears to be a nice workaround for server side usage. I used it on my document with multiple column text frames and it is removing the empty page as expected. If there is a better way to do this, let me know. Thanks.

Indesign server web service - where is the support to upload a file with the script and download the result?

Hi,
I am working on a POC that is supposed to convert indd files to pdf (i.e. using of course the indesign server). Basically I want to call the IDS Web Service (located on a different machine perhaps), pass in the input file, the conversion script and retrieve the result as part of the WebService call?
Browsing the documentation, examples, etc in the SDK, I couldn't see how the above can be achieved without the client handling the file transfer. Surely I must be missing something ...
thanks
Chris

What do you mean with POC?
InDesign Server is too precious (i.e. license cost) to waste its time with file transfers.
For a smaller scale, let a separate process (some http or smb server) on the same server hardware handle the files - so that the InDesign Server can access them on the fastest local volume.
If you plan for bigger, use a dedicated server for file sharing (your choice of SMB, NFS or whatever), where the input files are prepared by the client process, so that your load balancer can immediately point the next free instance of the InDesign server farm to the file. In that case be prepared for some try and error - high speed file sharing can be tricky with files written from one side not yet visible or incomplete to the other side, locking problems, Unicode file name trouble, unexpected time stamps and so forth.
Btw, there is also an InDesign Server forum which would be more appropriate for such discussions.
Dirk

I have made .indd file with some form fields in it, now haw to read these fields and manipulate its content through script in indesign

I have made .indd file with some form fields in it, now haw to read these fields and manipulate its content through script in indesign

It's probably best to ask in the InDesign Scripting forum:
InDesign Scripting

Scripting InDesign Server

I understand that when scripting the server, there is no such thing as an activeDocument, so app.activeDocument should be replaced with:
app.documents[0].getElements()[0]
if you want a resolved reference (app.documents[0] is usually good enough, though).
But what happens to commands like:
alert(Msg)
and it's confirm() and prompt() brethren? Do these cause a message on the server thereby bringing things to a halt? Or is the server intercepting these and moving on?
Is there a place a scripter can go to get information on what can or cannot be done on the server? Or should that be "what should or should not be done"?
Dave

Hi Dave,
There's a scripting guide and scripting reference that come with the server -- they're a little different than the desktop version... unfortunately the guide isn't quite different enough, so there's also 'trial and error'. :(
Alert, confirm, etc... Adobe InDesign Server will supress these.
Unfortunately they don't show up in the errorList so you don't have access to the supressed messages. If you do want the message to show up in the server console and to be available in the error list you can use these:
app.consoleout(Msg);
app.consoleerr(Msg);
Paul

Using a script on an indesign server

I am new to working on an InDesign Server. I have built a template that requires a javascript for alignment issues. What needs to be done so the script is accessed when the file is accessed via the server?

Please see this link,
http://cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk583/tk372/technologies_configuration_example09186a00800949ba.shtml
Regards,
~JG
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Invoking Indesign server plugin through script

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