What's new in AGETOR Version 4?

The AGETOR 4.0.0 major release contains a wealth of new functionality and tools that increases its ease of use while offering complete new possibilities in the realm of designing reports, printing documents, queuing, archiving and accessing internal as well as external documents for transformation processing using state-of-the-art tools.

The AGETOR Documents Web application provides a Google like search, browse and view interface to documents stored on local or remote media. In particular the AGETOR Document Archive and the AGETOR Document Queues. Document content search is based on the famous Lucene search engine and additional business domain meta properties may be added to documents and searched upon. AGETOR Documents support configuration of user individual work-flow actions for selected documents. E.g. for manual interaction with print queues or manual interaction during the transformation process.

The AGETOR Configuration Workbench (AWB) now makes visual transformation design and validation easier than ever with a graphical transformation editor. You can drag and drop pre-defined filters and other constructs onto the transformation diagram currently being edited. Transformation filters are visualized as circles connected by arrows to reflect the data flow. This greatly improves the intuitive understanding of the transformation and distribution processes and print-outs can serve as valuable system documentation. However, schema aware editors for the various AGETOR XML configuration files are still only a tab away and these provide more completion support that before; context aware valid filter parameters and values are suggested as you type.

The AWB Graphical Report Designer lets you define fancy reports over different data sources containing graphics, diagrams and complex calculations. You can localize the reports to deliver these in multiple languages and provide different overall styling depending on receiver.

Architecturally, AGETOR is also moving; to achieve some of the above features a new model for external media (FTP, mail etc.) access has been implemented. We call this abstraction for Access Points and it provides a uniform access to any media with simple operations to get, put, list and delete documents stored on the media. It is backed up by a strong media typing system and paves the way for future generic any-media to any-media exchange supported by user friendly wizards to create such exchanges. At present, Access Points can be used in AGETOR transformations to interact with documents in the archive, queues, file system or on an FTP server for example.

Installation Notes and Requirements

• AGETOR 4.0 requires Java 1.6
• All AGETOR packages have been released in a 4.0 version

AGETOR Document Archive

The AGETOR Document Archive lets you store any document types that you need to keep for revision or other later use. This is done as part of automated document processing - e.g. when the document is received from an external source, created or before sending it to an external source. You may add meta properties to the documents to describe them further - e.g. their type, source, purpose, state etc. The archive comes with an easy to use web interface and support document content plus meta data search and presentation in a Google like manner.

AGETOR Document Queues

Documents can be send to queues for later processing. As for the archive, queues are customizable and searchable with neat document presentation. Manual reordering, deletion or work-flow forwarding is possible.

Print and Reporting Tools

With AGETOR 4.0 the print package has been made self-contained; i.e. you may go through the complete cycle of report design, data mapping, output generation, adding overlay and concatenating files using the AGETOR Configuration Workbench tools for designing your report and hooking it up with transformation data and images.

For more information please see:

• I Want To Create Documents For Printing Or Viewing
• Introduction to the AGETOR Workbench

AGETOR Documents (aka Media Browser)

AGETOR Documents - Concepts and Configuration Guide

Format Conversions and Transformation Tools

• The new ScriptingFilter support transformation definition using scripting languages like Groovy, Java Script, BeanShell among others.
• With the DocumentConverterFilter a large range of format mappings are now possible with AGETOR; .pdf, .doc, .rft, .ppt, .jpg, .gif, .bmp and several other file types can be converted to other formats.
• The MediaCollectionZipperFilter allows you to zip a selected subset of files from a media; i.e. orders in the files system, emails with a certain subject line on an IMAP server or some temporary data set you have saved in memory while doing your business transformation
• The AccessPointFilter allows for fetching XML lists of files at a media (file system, FTP-server, IMAP mailbox, queue etc.). You may state query criteria to pin-point a subset of files - e.g. e-mails with a certain subject line or queue files with a certain state meta property or owner property if such were defined. Files can be fetched, deleted or more traditionally simply "put" to the media

Additional Improvements and Changes

• You may now construct e-mails with multiple attachments and body text programmatically during transformation processing
• The local AGETOR Help Wiki is no longer installed and activated by default (install time option). Rather the installation links to the online version of the documentation. This makes the AGETOR installation consume less resources and start up faster
• The AGETOR eXist runtime webapp is no longer installed and activated by default (install time option). The webapp is only required if your transformations should use the eXist database as document storage or use XQuery transformations on XML documents. This optimization makes the AGETOR installation consume less resources and start up faster. You may change this any time by commenting in the webapp in server.xml.

Category Release Document