Composite Documents

As mentioned in ?CHILI Publisher's limitations, our Editor is not meant for large documents, out of the box.

However, all of the concepts used throughout a standard web2print portal integration can be combined relatively easily to provide interfaces to the end user which simulate larger documents.

Concept

It basically boils down to storing a reference to individual (smaller) CHILI documents. These can be split up depending on your needs (covers as individual page or spread, center content as pages, spreads or small sections, ...). A division into spreads usually gives a good mix between design possibilities and easy of integration.

Managing the individual documents (in its simplest form) isn't much different from managing order lines in a shopping basket. At some point, you will probably want to present a unified preview to the end user. The graphic design for this is completely up to you, of course. From within that view (often a typical document spread list, but we've seen other nice implementations as well), the user is presented with the latest version of the document's preview thumbnails (or potentially a blank image, if no content is present yet). Clicking on a page can then (potentially after a little separate creation-workflow) open the new or existing CHILI document in an embedded Editor. Although there are many special cases here, specific to large documents, there is a potentially very large overlap with the ordering process of a single order line in a web2print portal (templace creation, content gathering, updating the document, etc.).

Once the document is open in an Editor, it can again behave very similar to the personalization step in a w2p portal. You can include your own, workflow-specific interface around the editor (Next/Cancel/Approve/...), and interact with it using JavaScript to make a seamless integration.

An edited (and saved) document can then launch new preview generation (and potentially in this phase already PDF generation for future collation).

While there can be a lot more to it, these steps can already go a long way towards a highly functional magazine or retail catalog.

To highlight a couple of the steps, you might visualize it as:

• The orange spread list being constructed by your portal
• The green frame containing a combination of your own page-specific workflows and CHILI Editor, in which case
  • The white area (or anyway you want to visualize it) containing more workflow-specific interface element
  • The blue area containing a (usuallly much more visually appealing) integrated Editor

Spread / page workflows

Each individual CHILI document in such a scenario has the possibility to follow its own workflows. Again, there is a large overlap with lines in a marketing or web2print portal, such as:

• Creation of a new document based on templates, blank documents, PDF backgrounds, etc.
• Data gathering before the document creation (and during the editing) using external content
• Fully automated database publishing of certain content
• Status management (and potentially annotation workflows) on the individual documents (which can be combined by the portal using the API functions)
• Various workspaces/interfaces for the document, depending on the logged in user or the document's status

And of course, it all can be combined in overall reporting as well, using the various API functions for content and info extraction

Additional Resources

??Embedding an Editor in your own portals

?Extracting Preview Images

?Using your own content in the Editor

?Creating output using the API