IBM® FileNet® Rendition Engine transforms documents into another format. The source documents might be one of many formats (such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) and the publication documentation format is either HTML or PDF.
IBM FileNet Rendition Engine is based on LIQUENT InSight Rendering V4, which is built on the LIQUENT Vista framework and includes the LIQUENT Vista Java™ API that integrates with Content Platform Engine publishing when rendering documents into another format.
For a complete description of the limitations of the LIQUENT InSight Rendering software, see Known limitations of FileNet Rendition Engine 5.2.
The LIQUENT software is comprised of several COM+ programs that perform various processes, such as retrieving, rendering, compressing, and distributing documents, and managing the processing activities and message queues.
The LIQUENT software uses a database to store configuration and job activity information. Any IBM FileNet Rendition Engine servers and Content Platform Engine servers that are configured to do transformation publishing must be able to communicate with the database. The LIQUENT software on the IBM FileNet Rendition Engine server uses ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) to communicate with the database. The LIQUENT Vista Java API software on the Content Platform Engine server uses Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) to communicate with the database. There is also communication between the LIQUENT software on the IBM FileNet Rendition Engine servers as well as between them and the LIQUENT Vista Java API software on the Content Platform Engine servers. This communication is done with LIQUENT proprietary TCP/IP socket communication over ports specified in the configuration.
You can use the LIQUENT Domain Manager program that is available on the IBM FileNet Rendition Engine server to perform the following tasks:
The configuration information that is stored in the database is referred to as the LIQUENT Vista domain and can be viewed with the LIQUENT Domain Manager. The LIQUENT Vista domain specifies repositories, where the "com" repositories represent each actual IBM FileNet Rendition Engine server and the Java repositories represent LIQUENT Vista Java API clients, such as each Content Platform Engine server that is configured to do transformation publishing.
A typical configuration consists of one or more IBM FileNet Rendition Engine servers connected to one or more Content Platform Engine servers. Although you can install the IBM FileNet Rendition Engine software on the same server as a Content Platform Engine, doing so can impact the performance and usability of both Content Platform Engine and IBM FileNet Rendition Engine. Rendering is a resource-intensive process that typically requires starting the authoring application to render the document to PDF or HTML. The authoring applications must be installed and configured on the IBM FileNet Rendition Engine server and must be available for exclusive use by IBM FileNet Rendition Engine. Some authoring applications display the authoring application windows or status messages, making it difficult to use the server for any interactive activities.
For the LIQUENT software to properly function, the LIQUENT Windows service called BusinessServiceServer must be started after a reboot. The service starts the BusinessServiceManager process that responds to a rendering request issued from Content Platform Engine publishing through the LIQUENT Vista Java API.
Rendering a document into another format is broken down into several steps on the IBM FileNet Rendition Engine server:
The first content element of the source document is transferred to the IBM FileNet Rendition Engine server.
The rendered files are compressed.
The compressed files are passed back to the Content Platform Engine server to become the publication document.