Creating a Custom Management Interface for any Windows Application

Recently I posted an article about creating a new Custom Management Interface using the Microsoft Management Console up at faxlearning.wordpress.com. This article specifically focuses on Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition, but the concepts apply to any Windows application. Check out the article and let me know what you think, either here or on the faxlearning blog site.

You can also watch a video version of the tutorial at youtube.com/opentextfddg.

Transitioning the Blogs

As a reader of this blog, you know there are three things that I care about and write about: Travel, Gadgets, and Captaris. But most of you are interested in only one of those topics. Well, at the recent Captaris International Partner Conference I was invited to start blogging on the Captaris Developer Portal and saw this as a chance to move one of the audiences to a place that is more relevant to them. So starting now all posts about Captaris Workflow, Rightfax, and Alchemy will be posted on my new blog at the Captaris Developer Portal. On the site I am TrainerMatt and my blog is: http://www.captaris.com/DeveloperProgram/blogs/trainermatt_blog/default.aspx

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License Types in Alchemy

When you purchase Alchemy, you can purchase several different license types. Administrator gives all knowing access to everything. Index can still add content. Search just searches. Administrator costs the most, and Search the least. So a company will typically get many Search licenses, a few

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A Simple Search Application for Alchemy

One of my students this week asked about creating an extremely simple search client for Alchemy. Out of the box, Alchemy Search can be fairly easy to use, but there are still a lot of buttons that one could press. And if all you want is a simple search to show all the documents across all your repositories it may be a bit too much. So I created what has to be one of the simplest UIs possible:

As you type in the search box at the top left, results start showing up in the list below:

Then you just click on a document and you get a preview:

You can continue typing and your search is refined. No need to press enter. So how did I get here? Well, its just a simple Windows form application with a SplitContainer. On the right side I have the Alchemy Viewer, and on the left is a text box and a listbox. Whenever the text in the text box changes, it does the search again. One of the benefits of Alchemy is that the search is extremely quick, so this app is amazingly quick.

When I do the search I have to ensure that the text doesn't end with and or or. If it does, then don't pass it to the search because those are keywords we use. Then I clear the textbox and clear the query. The search itself is easy:

auQuery.AddFullTextQuery(tbSearch.Text);
auQuery.SearchGroup(auSGroup);

if (auQuery.Results.Count > 0)
{
    foreach (Alchemy.Result aResult in auQuery.Results)
    {
        foreach (Alchemy.Item aItem in aResult.Items)
        {
            lbResults.Items.Add(aItem.Title);
        }
    }
}

This also populates the listbox. Then when I click on an item, I tell the Viewer to ViewItem(). It took all of 20 minutes to write ugly code while exhausted. Give me another 30 minutes to clean it up and I might be willing to share it. Of course, this assumes you have Alchemy.

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Picking Alchemy Databases on a Server

Earlier today I had a need to choose databases from a server to show up in Alchemy Administrator. The problem was that the server wasn't on a domain (its my development server which is running in a VirtualPC vm). I couldn't find the server easily, so I thought there had to be a better way. So I created a tool to make it easier. When you first launch it, you get this:

Enter a server

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Using Powershell to manage Alchemy - Add local users to a Role

Today in an Captaris Alchemy class I got an interesting question. One of the students has a customer who wants to use local users instead of domain users when setting up integrated security. Integrated security is where you can authorize users to view databases, folders, and/or files based on the username they are logged in as. Normally associating the database ‘roles’ with domain users makes the most sense, but occasionally there is a need to set up local users. Now the problem is that the Server Console UI doesn’t allow for anything other than domain users. So the only way to add a local user is through the Alchemy API. Before Powershell that would have probably meant breaking out Visual Studio. But now I think it is far easier to deal with. Here is a sample script that will take two parameters: a role name you want to add a user to, and a user name in the format servername\username.

param($role=$(Throw "A role name is required..."),

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Developing Datagrabber Scripts with PSPad

One of my colleagues in the US Sales Engineering organization at Captaris built out a great set of templates for using UltraEdit to build out DataGrabber scripts. The problem with it is that I can’t really use it in my classes since I can’t really use UltraEdit without having paid for it for all 12 training laptops. So I wanted to find another similar editor I could use for my classes. I had a few basic requirements:

• Light & quick.
• Use of clips or templates that were easy to customize.
• The ability to plug in a compiler and to view the output without have to change the viewing context.
• Built-in Hex view for determining line and record delimiters
• Free or minimal cost.

After trying Notepad2, Notepad++, Programmers Editor, Context, and many others, I found PSPad to offer all that I needed. And figuring out how to make a clip file that could be used to create DataGrabber scripts easily took less than a single morning. So now you just create a new definition file, and press <ctrl><space> to add all of the common elements of a datagrabber script. Now I can create a script in less than 10 minutes. Pressing <ctrl><F9> to compile shows the log file at the bottom of the window. Now I can quickly tweak and re-compile until I get it just right.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, Datagrabber is a component of Alchemy, our archival and records management tool that has been available for more than 10 years. Many of our customers use Alchemy to store customer records in a searchable format, such as invoices and statements. So if they have a mainframe batch that runs every night that produces a single text file with 1000’s of customer statements, the problem is trying to store each as a separate record in the archive. Datagrabber parses the text file into a series of records. It also identifies customer numbers, invoice numbers, names, etc based on a definition file. This definition file is what I am using PSPad to create.

You can find my DataGrabber config for PSPad here along with instructions on how to install it.