Davisor - Offisor Applications

Davisor Offisor is essentially an enabler software component suite that opens the XML world and the standard tools it provides to documents that would otherwise have to be processed by some proprietary means. In particular, Davisor Offisor provides powerful special software that can transform difficult-to-use file formats into much more accessible XML formats. Once this initial transformation is done, the newly formatted documents may then be processed further with various other transformations. The major benefit of all this is that once an originally a non-XML document has been brough inside the scope of XML world, all the gains from XML technology become immediately available for the application that wishes to operate on that document content.

Some typical application areas that benefit from this approach are:

Document indexing
Document data extracting
Publishing documents on-line
Publishing printable documents
Dynamic document composition
Document archive and re-use

Offisor and transformation examples (Davisor offers services for developing custom XSL-T code)

Document indexing

In order to search your document archive efficiently, you need to access every single word in every document. And not just in the text, but also in the drawings and the meta data the documents contain. Even better if you can access the words in different document formats, such as PowerPoint and HTML. Offisor does that for you.

Offisor can be used to create a document indexing system which accesses every word in all your documents. With Davisor Offisor, you can extract the text content by writing a custom SAX content handler, which listens to SAX character events and combines words from the received characters. The result: a fully accessible document index.

Document data extracting

Users often want to know certain detailed information about the document, such as the author of the document. Also form processing is a typical use case: user has typed information to a Word or HTML form and we want to copy that data to i.e. database. Offisor can do this easily; all that is needed is to create a DOM model and use an XPath API to access the document information.

Davisor Offisor download package contains a XPath example source code that can be used as a basis for any data extraction implementation.

Publishing documents on-line

Ever think of all the legacy documents in your archives you know would be very useful if only you could publish them on-line? Product sheets for extranets, process descriptions and manuals for intranets, etc. Offisor brings all this material on-line for you.

First you use Offisor to convert all non-XML documents automatically to XML. You can then convert them further to an on-line publishing format, such as HTML. Better yet, during the conversion you can either maintain the original document layout and look-and-feel, reproducing them in the on-line document, or you can reformat the original content into a standard company layout. The choice is yours.

Publishing printable documents

It is great to have documents in electronic format, but sometimes you still need to print them. Product manuals, fact sheets, internal process manuals the list goes on. XML produced by Offisor is a perfect basis also for printing and publishing documents, e.g. in PDF format. What is more, you can decided whether you want to reproduce the original document layout with only minimal alternations (such as recalculated paragraph and page numbers), or to apply a completely new style that gives all your documents a consistent look, regardless of their origin.

Davisor Publishor can directly convert Word and PowerPoint document to PDF and HTML.

Creating dynamic documents

All companies need to create and publish customized forms, presentations and other documents, which use a template layout and receive data from external data sources. Davisor Offisor makes this possible also for Word and PowerPoint users.

The standard XML features in Offisor allow XML document fragments to be embedded inside other XML documents. With appropriate references to such fragments, a template XML documents can define elaborate composite documents that collect content both from the template itself, and from multiple external data sources.

Dynamic document fragment composition can be done during a custom XSL transformation phase, using external entity references. When such a transformation is done, the transformation will need to refer to the appropriate dynamic content source, and include the material it provides into the document instance being created. The content source may be anything that can be referenced with an appropriate system URI: a web service, a local file, or even a direct database query.

Creating custom XSL transformations requires considerable expertise. To help our customers to solve their dynamic document creation needs, Davisor offers also XSL consulting services. For more information, please see our service offerings, or contact our sales directly.

Davisor Publishor offers an easy way to combine XML data to Word template.

Archiving document for later re-use