Could anyone help me? I need to insert information to the header of a pdf from a customer form online with php. I am not a programmer so I need a sense of direction before I speak to my developers.
The idea is to get licence information from a field, insert the information to the header and save the result as securely as is reasonably possible before the customised file is downloaded.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
This will generally involve opening your existing PDF file with an appropriate PDF manipulation module (Zend_Pdf works for this purpose), performing whatever operations you need, such as inserting data into the document, and then outputting the document to the user with the appropriate headers (content type and disposition) set.
If you want customers to be able to download files several times, it would be wise to have the licensing information be gathered from the user account information, rather than a form.
First of all, asking for information on a particular library or tool to use is off bounds for StackOverflow (as it draws mostly opinionated answers. But even more importantly, in my experience, going to your developers and telling them which library to use while you don't know anything about it and are not a developer, is not generally a good idea. Focus on what you want to accomplish; don't worry too much about what technically is needed for them to do what you want. That's their job.
Looking at your question, there's a couple of things you might think about and discuss with them:
1) Taking information and adding it on top of an existing PDF file, is not the end of the world from a technical point of view. There are probably 100 or more different tools and libraries that can accomplish this in many different ways.
2) Much more technically challenging and worthy of a discussion with them is "save the result as securely as is reasonably possible before the customised file is downloaded". Normally, when you add information to a PDF document, it's not trivial to change it afterwards. But it's far from impossible. And if it's only a matter of removing stuff, it's even easier. A tool such as Adobe Acrobat for example will happily let you remove a bunch of text / graphics from a PDF file. If you want to prevent that, you have to at least protect your PDF document; set a number of flags in it that prevent it from being edited for example.
That's still not going to be waterproof, as these flags are supposed to be honoured by PDF processing applications. Adobe Acrobat does that and so do most other "decent" PDF applications, but it's certainly possible to circumvent this if you want it hard enough.
So, from your product management point of view, think about what reasonably secure means and have a discussion about that with your developers. That's probably going to get you much further than suggesting a particular library they're going to resent instantly because it comes from a non-developer :)
Related
I'm creating an app which generates a random question from a list (currently stored as a Numbers doc). Once that question is answered by the user, the unique question ID, the question itself and their answer is stored in core data.
When the user requests a new question one will be generated randomly from the original document and it will then be cross referenced with core data to find out if the user has previous answered that question.
I haven't included the code of my app at the moment as I'm not really looking for specific coding help. As someone who is new to the world of code I'm just looking for a nudge in the right direction for me to go and do more studying.
JSON looks like a possible, but the more I read about that the more it seems that it is about an app communicating with a website. I don't really want the questions to be accessed by just anyone, so putting them on my website might not work? Could I do it with a file local in the app? maybe a CSV?
I'm anticipating the file may become quite big as I add more questions - so I'm not sure if that changes things?
Thanks so much in advance, and apologies if this isn't quite the right way to ask questions on here.
I'm just looking for a nudge in the right direction for me to go and
do more studying.
There are many options to solve your problem. Each option depends on your skill, time and if the solution is even necessary for the app you want to make. In the end it's you who decides on which solution solves your problem. There are a few options:
creating your own backend
have a local file in your app
or use a third party service like Firebase.
Each option has its own benefits. Just to list a few:
Local file:
You could have a local file in nearly any format (XML, JSON, .plist) etc. The downside is that your app isn't dynamic - you have to manually keep adding text to this file and update your app trough the App Store for your users to see these changes. If you're going with this approach, I'd recommend using a .plist or a JSON file which is saved in your project. How to implement this correctly is beyond the scope of the question, but there are plenty tutorials out there to help you getting started.
You could put your data in a .plist file. This is nothing more than a dictionary with key-value data (same principle as JSON where each key has a value). An example:
question1 is the key, of type String, containing the value "How are you today". It's easy to read from this .plist since it's the same principle as JSON.
Also, JSON is just a format, it's used often to communicate with websites, but it's not limited to sites only.
Custom backend
This means that you make a backend on which your app can communicate with. You'd have to host your backend, write logic / code on your backend and so on. This can be very time consuming, especially if your app isn't that big/demanding. I wouldn't recommend this unless you have the experience, time, patience and need for this solution.
Third party
This can be a nice solution. Using a third party service like Firebase means that you have your data online. The Firebase library has been well tested and has great documentation to get you started. It's secure, fast, simple but .. it does take a little bit of time to learn how it works - but the end result is that you have a dynamic app where you can add, delete, edit questions and so on. This data can be protected if you wish - which means only authenticated users can access this data (Nobody else will be spying on your data :))
I don't really want the questions to be accessed by just anyone, so
putting them on my website might not work?
Read custom backend and Third Party.
Could I do it with a file local in the app?
Yes. Read Local file.
maybe a CSV?
That's possible but I wouldn't recommend it, but that's a personal opinion. I find it outdated and it's more difficult to work with than JSON.
I'm anticipating the file may become quite big as I add more questions
- so I'm not sure if that changes things?
What is a big file? Nowadays reading a "big" JSON file is probably nothing more than a few MB at most. Your phone reads this in no time. This won't be an issue for your phone or app.
I'm new to iOS Development and am trying to make an application that essentially sorts through a list of 300 names or so. I've got the Drill-Down part of the application down, aside from the detailView, but am now faced with a challenge.
What I would like to do is have users select from 3 fields with a UIPickerView to come up with shorter lists for every time a user is looking for a person. I'd like to use a .plist, but I also have an XML feed of the information. Before I waste all of my time structuring these data sources, does anybody have a good overview as to how I should approach this?
Also, I've asked some this question before, and they tell me to read up on introductory iOS development topics. I understand the mechanics of development, I just can't ever figure out how to approach a task properly. (I'm working on it!)
Thanks in advance. I'd share an image to help clarify, but my rep isn't high enough.
Snip: It looks like I misread your intention which makes my earlier comments irrelevant, you want to have the user select one of 3 options to shrink the list, if I'm not mistaken.
Some more questions for you, so I take it that this XML feed is going to be potentially changing between times that the user loads up the app? Will it only ever grow or are those 300 or so names that are loaded once set for good? The reason I ask so that you can maybe see my train of thought is whether or not using Core Data might be useful. You could easily store your large list locally, save time having to reload this large list frequently, and also you can use the built fetchedObjectController to search your collection of names. I'll keep thinking about it and once you get a chance to answer these questions we can continue.
Ill check back for an edit or comment, and see if I can give you an approach. Also, maybe edit your question with any of your own approach ideas and we could also start from there and refine them if needed.
Edit 2: From the information in the comments this is one of the ways that I could see this being done that make sense to me:
Since you seem to be able to control the information you receive from the feed I would set it up to send you only the contacts that need to be added/removed. You could handle this a few ways depending on your deployment intentions but I would go with the following:
Find a way to signal a first time run of the application, and as a result all contacts would be new, and you could populate your list fully with a slightly longer first time setup. Then any further changes could be quickly handled by smaller edits made to the local list.
You would need to set up Core Data for your application, which should be fairly straightforward in your case, and after this you can use the built in NSFetchRequest to do your searches that will then quickly return a list of narrowed down contacts. As for the physical picker that is just a matter of building the UI which will require some design from your end as you are the only one that knows what you are going for in that regard. Depending on the complexity of your app and what functionality you will want to include you could get away with 1-2 views that simply do the displaying of the contacts in a table and then the picker just reloads when appropriate.
I'm not familiar with the implementation of XML Feeds and receiving data from them, but I have done XML Response parsing into Core Data from a SOAP service before and they shouldn't be terribly different.
Regarding resource to get you started should you need them, I would recommend the following:
eBooks:
http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/Objective-C_2.0_Essentials
http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/IPhone_iOS_4_Development_Essentials_Xcode_4_Edition
Tutorials:
http://www.raywenderlich.com/
The eBooks I have linked are both absolutely fantastic and one of the few xCode 4.0 books that I was able to find that seemed to be of an actual usable quality. They both contain easy to follow and clear tutorials on simple and more advanced aspects of programming for iOS.
Ray's site is an immensely helpful resource as it contains both a very active forum base for iOS programming in addition to a constantly growing tutorial collection as there are 4-5 people that constantly are creating new tutorials that the community votes on and suggests every week. It contains some more advanced topics than the above books and I would recommend looking at it after doing a few walk through/tutorials from the books.
I'll stick around if you have any further questions, otherwise you can send me a notification via these comments, or just post another question and someone is bound to help you out!
-Karoly
I am researching CMS systems, something I know little about. I am an animator and generate large numbers of files and have many source files that I use. There are so many its become difficult to manage them all and keep some organization. Can someone suggest an Open Source CMS solution that could aid in organizing these files.
Thanks
Apparently, these systems are called "digital asset management systems" when they're not about text but about images.
An overview about open-source ones can be found here
Razuna looks quite good, I'm looking for a similar solution - though i probably won't have trillions of textures files or something, I do have loads of .psd/.ai/.indd formats, which a number of systems offer thumbnail preview to a certain degree.
One thing to look out for is whether the system can handle/use/manipulate IPTC metadata, basically what this means is when metadata is embedded in an asset, the system can present that to you in a digestable format. An example of this is Google's Picassa which allows search indexing on this data. Also a number of stock asset sites both use and produce this data in their asset sets - so when you download an image for example, it comes pre-tagged with "woman, standing, smiling, photo, office" so you only have to add your own tags on top, for example "telecoms project, overview module".
Again, if you're generating a swathe of files from your output then it may depend on the nature of your file output as to what kind of versioning/management you need?
If, for example, you have output that is made up of a bunch of source files, some of which are program-specific and some of which are linked assets, then you might want to put the whole lot under version control (PlasticSCM or Subversion perhaps) and "exclude" graphic files by their file type. Then, use something like Razuna to upload, hold and display your graphic files.
I noticed with Razuna that you can organise things by category, and assign multiple categories - that is, you have 1 set of files but multiple views of them. That's why I liked Razuna, though to be honest the demo crapped out but it could've been because I changed email and profile data half way through the trial.
Interested to know how you go in your search and what you've found to be useful!
We're looking for something as well, preferably cloud-based, but that's not a requirement.
We're looking right now at Razuna. It has a lot of great features. The organization seems very flexilble, which is great. The
But it doesn't seem very mature in some ways. The development team I think is small. Some features don't work reliably (e.g., uploading additional versions of an asset [such as different resolutions] works intermittently and only with IE as far as I can tell.)
So if anyone has any other systems worth a look I'd be glad to hear about them.
In the end, Razuna was just too immature for us. It's a great effort. The dev team is obviously talented and sincere. In a couple of years they may well have a great product. I wish them luck.
We've settled on a commercial service, WebDAM. It some ways it's very comprehensive and does a lot of things well. The price is not too bad, and there's a nice API to program against, so we will be able to lean on it heavily for image selection and then incorporate it into our automated processes, grabbing images as needed programmatically.
In on other ways it a little maddening. The UI, in particular, could use a lot of work to make it easier to use for the average person. It was clearly designed by programmers. A lot of UI niceties that would not be that hard to add are missing. Obvious things like boxes with data being too small while a lot of screen real estate goes unused.
The keyword capability is useful but there doesn't have obvious things like synonyms and stemming when you search. This will make things harder on our users and will have to be planned carefully to make sure it's as useful as it can be.
We're still just in the planning stages, so not sure how it will fly once we go live, but we're going to give it a shot. You might want to have a look at it. But they have a much more mature development effort going on and more support for the customer, which swayed us in the end.
I am bouncing around the idea of creating a custom document versioning system to use on business rule manuals. These manuals are broken up into outlined sections which contain one rule per section which are outlined in various ways (1.1, 1.2, etc). There are many manuals which contain the same rule for different locations in the country (down to the state/county level), however many locations will have different versions of the rules depending on business needs or whatnot.
My thought is to create a system which will manage versions of each section/rule separately. This would make the management of this mess much easier to maintain (think hundreds of manuals times hundreds of rules), and it would make fielding query requests from management much quicker.
Ok, it's a fairly easy and straightforward design to this point. Now for the monkey wrench. These rules are regulated by government agencies, so they must be submitted to and approved by state agencies. In doing this, many states require only the exact pages which are updated for each request to be submitted for approval. Once they are approved, these pages will get a new effective date and the rest of the manual will remain the same. There are business reasons for this process.
So my choice of document format has to allow for flowing layout much like Word, however I need to be able to programatically determine the page range of these sections and if changes or additions will cause a repagination.
The most complex layout will contain only tables, headers/footers, and a table of contents. I have thought about using OOXML, but I don't see a way to determine pagination without loading Word which is something I would prefer to avoid. I could create my own pagination algorithm, but that sounds a lot like reinventing the wheel.
Can anyone offer pointers to a solution whether it is an open document format, a book, or something else? Thank you for taking the time to read this.
If you want a truly modular document, then DocBook might be worth a look. You have all the rich formatting you need but it does need a bit of work. It really depends on who's doing the authoring and what tools they're comfortable using. DocBook is a rich mark-up language and you can do anything from work in the base plain text file or look at a number of WYSIWYG editors, e.g. ArborText.
It's not Word though - which might be enough to put your authors off!
If you did go with DocBook, you would maintain each document section in a separate text file so your versioning solution would work well. DocBook can produce output in a number of formats simultaneously so you could have an HTML version, an OOXML version, and a PDF version produced from the same source. A PDF version of each changed section might be appropriate to send to government agencies for approval.
On pagination, you could make life a lot easier for yourself by not having continuous page numbers. Use section or chapter based page numbering, e.g. page I-1, I-2, ..., II-1, II-2.
This is a question about the development workflow of front end engineers. I am starting a project for a rather large site with lots of pages, each page has multiple steps, and it's very difficult to lay out all the content in a spreadsheet.
The content of each page will be delivered in a spreadsheet cell, and some pages have multiple variable section that are determined by user's preferences.
I was asked my opinion about how to structure the deliverable. I am wondering if there is a best practice out there for structuring this kind of deliverable? Because when you have a poorly structured deliverable it can be almost as mindnumbing as using pen-and-pencil to write code.
Do you have any tools, formats, practices for creating deliverables that are easy to work with?
It sounds like you are just doing the UI design and then giving it to the front-end engineers.
If that is correct, I would suggest that you see if you can do the rough html/css work to get the page to look as you want, and then they can go in and give it the functionality, but that way you have an idea what is possible.
You can do much of the work, then leave comments about trying to center something a bit better, for example.
I am not a big fan of just getting the design on paper or as an image, it would be easier to just get the html/css.
There are plenty of tools now that make css and html easy to do, even if you have the css inside the html, they can separate the two, but, it would be a huge help to the designers.
Just do one page, and give it to them, and then come back in a day or two and get feedback as to what their thoughts are, and how you can improve what you give them.
As you go through this process, after a while both groups will know what to expect and you can get the rest done quickly.
This is more of an agile methodology with the front-end engineers as your customers.
My suggestion would be mockups or wireframes for the pages. Mockups would be examples of the pages in various states while the wireframe is a detailed document of the structure of the page.
HTML and CSS is way too complicated for mockup use. I usually first create a requirement backlog for UI/functionalities as well (just a list of priorized reqs in Excel).
Especially for a large site development you should also have the process and data flow definitions done (UML or other way of description) to help you define the mentioned requirements.
Based on these you will know what kind of steps does the whole site funcionality need (i.e. pages) and what the page hierarchy and structure will be like. This way it's much easier to get a grasp of the whole thing.
After that we'll create fast wireframes and visualize the end result with fast mockups done as images with Photoshop or similar. These are absolutely vital in my experience as it helps the customer (and other stakeholders) to actually understand what is beind done. For this the html and css are simply too slow to run multiple iterations with.