CaptureBites MetaServer Version History

FIX: Previewing separation rules using a Multi-page TIFF sample file caused an error.

NEW (still in development): KOFAX VRS UI: We are integrating Kofax VRS and started with the User Interface to setup VRS. You can preview the UI by selecting Kofax VRS from the Edit actions. The functionality is not yet plugged in, this is just the first step in integrating VRS. We will launch the final VRS integration together with the new online licensing method in a future release.

NEW: NEW DEMO WORKFLOW: CB – PAGE SIZE SEPARATION:

The main MetaServer installer includes a new workflow called CB – PAGE SIZE SEPARATION. It makes use of the { Unit of Length } variable to make it both work in US and Metric regions. It separates on A5 pages which can be scanned in portrait and landscape mode. Both orientations are detected and trigger a new document. Inspect the Separate Document action of this workflow to see how it works.

NEW: EXTRACT ACTION: SPACE LENGTH:

Previously, the Space Length parameter only influenced the spaces coming from text-based PDFs. The spaces coming from image-based PDFs that went through OCR, were always the spaces as returned by the OCR engine.

In the updated settings, spaces generated by OCR are now called “Scanned Image (OCR)” with “Automatic” space length:

If you select that option you continue using the default behaviour.

However, now you can also switch to “Custom” space length:

In this mode, you can adjust the space length parameter:
– Increase the value if the result shows too many spaces
– Decrease the value if words start sticking together (too few spaces)

The value is a relative value, it’s the space relative to the detected font size. So, a space between a large font needs to be larger than a space between very small text to be considered as a space.

 

NEW: ORGANIZER / VALIDATION: COPY CONTENT OF DOCUMENT LIST:

When you select “Open Document” or “Open Skipped”, you are presented a list of all documents that are waiting to be Organized or Validated.

You can choose to “Copy All” (copy the whole list) or only copy the selected line items.

When you paste this in Notepad, each column is adjusted to the longest value automatically and formatted like below:

	Workflow	Date Created	Report Nr.	Inspector
1	CB – INSPECTION REPORTS	2019/12/18 14:33:43.225	148032	Wallace D Cosare
2	CB – INSPECTION REPORTS	2019/12/18 14:33:43.226	170080	Travis M Linane
3	CB – INSPECTION REPORTS	2019/12/18 14:33:43.227	110441	Arin T Dadiw
4	CB – INSPECTION REPORTS	2019/12/18 14:33:43.228	151030	Andrew m Ries
5	CB – INSPECTION REPORTS	2019/12/18 14:33:43.229	167915	James H Steffenson III

When you paste the content in Excel, columns are also formatted correctly with gray shaded column headers.

 

ENHANCEMENT: IMPORT FROM FOLDER:

Instead of .reserved we now rename files as .servername_reserved to reserve them for import by a specific MetaServer in case of load balancing.

ENHANCEMENT: IMPROVED HANDLING OF ANTIVIRUS FILE LOCKING:

We now skip data folders that cannot be created when locked by antivirus software.

For example, McAfee VirusScan Access Protection prevents the creation of of folders ending with .888 because it thinks they are created by ransomware. We create time stamped folders sometimes ending with .888 and they got locked by McAfee causing errors. We now skip data folders that cannot be created because locked by antivirus software and just create the next one available.

ENHANCEMENT: PROCESSING OF VERY HIGH RESOLUTION OR LARGE SIZE IMAGES:

The logic of how to process these images has been normalized. This is the high level logic:

1) VIEWING: To accelerate viewing and avoid memory issues, we scale very large images that are greater than 17.5 M pixels to a size just below 17.5 M pixels with a resolution as high as possible from this list: 600, 400, 300, 240, 200, 150, 100, 72, 50.

With very large images above 250M pixels, scaling and displaying may take several minutes.

2) SEARCHABLE PDF: We tested the Convert to Seachable PDF action with an A0 document at 300 DPI (14000 x 10000 pixels = 140 M pixels) and it was processed correctly. Images with more than 140 M pixels cannot be converted to searchable PDF and are moved to the Errors tab.

3) OCR EXTRACTION OF METADATA AND VALIDATION: A0 400 DPI (18700 x 13250 = 248 M Pixels) was processed in a sub minute time span and displayed correctly in Validation. A0 600 DPI (28000 x 19850 = 556 M Pixels) took about 6 minutes to process and it took another 6 minutes to view it (requires scaling). So, technically, it is possible to extract and validate A0 600 DPI images, but it takes a very long time.

4) CONVERT TO BLACK AND WHITE: We tested the Convert to Black and White action with an A0 document at 300 DPI (14000 x 10000 pixels = 140 M pixels) and it was processed correctly. Images with more than 140 M pixels cannot be converted to Black and White and are moved to the Errors tab.

5) CONVERT TO TIF: We tested the Convert to TIF action with an A0 document at 400 DPI (18700 x 13250 = 248 M Pixels) and it was processed correctly. Images with more than 248 M pixels cannot be converted to TIF and are moved to the Errors tab.

6) IMPORT JPG, PNG and TIF: Importing non-PDF files requires an internal conversion to PDF. This conversion is limited to A0 documents at 400 DPI (18700 x 13250 = 248 M Pixels). JPG, PNG and TIF images with more than 248 M pixels cannot be imported and are moved to the Errors tab.

7) SCALING: With the scaling action, you can reduce the image resolution so it can be processed after all. For example, you could convert a 600 DPI A0 to 300 DPI to be able to convert it to Black and White. We have tested scaling with A0 600 DPI color images (28000 x 19850 = 556 M Pixels) and it worked without issues.

8) APPENDING PAGES TO AN EXISTING LARGE PDF: We had a request to append A4 pages to an existing, very large A0 PDF. The A0 PDF is generated with a large A0 scanner and MetaServer Exports A4 pages to a file with the same name as the A0 PDF. By using the Append or Prepend feature in the Export to Folder action, pages are added to the A0 PDF. This process does not require to load the very large A0 images in memory and appending and prepending pages to an existing A0 PDF works very fast and without limitations.

FIX: COPY EXTRACT RULES DID NOT COPY THE ZONE:

If you defined a specific zone on a sample to extract text, barcodes, etc., copying the settings of such rule did not copy the zone.

FIX: FIT JPG to A4 / LETTER:

In the Extract text setup dialog, when you selected an oversized JPG file and enabled the “Fit JPG to A4 / Letter” option in one of the import actions and then clicked Test, the orange zone jumped to another position.

ENHANCEMENT: If you use illegal characters in a folder or file name then MetaServer automatically converts these to legal characters to make it possible to write the file to disk. If you want to control yourself how the illegal characters are replaced, please apply a Replace rule to the fields that you use in the Export file name.

This is the conversion table:
| (pipe) is converted to ¦ (broken bar)
* (asterisk) is converted to ˟ (superscript x)
? (question mark) is converted to ¿ (inverted question mark)
” (quotation mark) is converted to ‘ (apostrophe)
: (colon) is converted to ꞉ (modified letter colon)
< (less than) is converted to ( (left parenthesis)
> (greater than) is converted to ) (right parenthesis)

For example, if a time field contains 11:50:00 and you don’t replace the colons with a replace rule. If you use this field in a file or folder name, then it will be auto-converted to 11꞉50꞉00

\\ and / are not converted because they can be used to create a folder. However, they are not supported in a DocuWare file name.

The Export to DocuWare action auto-converts \\ and / as follows:
\\ (backslash) is converted to ¦ (broken bar)
/ (forward slash) is converted to ¦ (broken bar)

ENHANCEMENT: The Date Validation rule is renamed to Date and Time, because it also supports time elements.

FIX: MEMORY ISSUE IN THE CONVERT TO BLACK AND WHITE ACTION: When converting files with a large number of pages to black & white, sometimes a memory error locked the conversion action: “Insufficient memory to continue the execution of the program.” We saw it occuring with a  PDF with 97 pages.

This is now fixed and tested with a 500 page PDF without any problem.

FIX: PDF pages with huge dimensions like 2m x 3m caused an error during processing “A generic error occurred in GDI+”. We now adjust the size automatically, so they can be processed without memory issues.

NEW: PDF files with an access permissions password to prevent printing, copying text, modifying, etc. can now be imported and processed (including document separation and extraction). Previously these PDFs generated errors.

ENHANCEMENT: Upgraded to EvoHtmltoPDF V8. This is used to convert the email body of imported emails to a PDF.

FIX: TEST EXTRACTION ON NON-PDF FILES: Test did not produce *.XtrTxt files when non-PDF (jpg, tif, png) were used for testing. This caused testing to never accelerate after the first test on non-PDF files. This is now fixed.

FIX: The { Import File Subfolder, x } variable did not resolve correctly during testing. It did still correctly resolve during runtime.

FIX: VALIDATION NAVIGATION THROUGH RESERVED AND UNRESERVED BUTTONS: We improved the behavior of the NEXT and PREVIOUS navigation through a list of reserved and unreserved documents in previous release, but broke something in the OK and OK ALL behavior. OK and OK ALL now works as before.

This is how it now works:

Assume you have 2 reserved and 8 unreserved. The NEXT and PREVIOUS buttons cycle through all 10 documents. Before version 3.0.26, it only cycled through the reserved documents. In other words, with NEXT and PREVIOUS you can now navigate to all documents available for a user. This includes documents reserved for a specific user and unreserved. It skips documents reserved for other users because they are not available.

OK and OK ALL prioritize Reserved documents and will first go through the reserved documents. If there are no reserved documents to validate anymore, it starts going through the unreserved. Obviously OK and OK ALL will never display documents that are reserved for other users.

ENHANCEMENT: When a file is corrupt, for example a zero bytes file, it is moved to the errors tab instead of causing a critical red import error.

ENHANCEMENT: JPG files with JPE and JFIF extensions are now also considered as valid JPG files and will be imported and processed by MetaServer.

ENHANCEMENT: PNG files incorrectly using a JPG extensions are now processed correctly. Previously such incorrectly named PNG files came out as solid green images.

FIX: Import KTM generated TIF files caused an error: “File is corrupted.” This is now fixed.

FIX: Rejected Emails were processed by default. Reject emails are emails without valid attachments. By default, these emails are not processed anymore.

FIX: Importing document while rebooting Active Directory server, caused a critical red import error. When an incident, such as “network path does not exist”, occurs during listing of files in the import folder, MetaServer does not get in a critical red error state anymore. We had a case where the customer rebooted the Active Directory server causing the list process to be interrupted and causing a critical red error. Thanks to this fix, MetaServer will resume importing files gracefully as soon as the network path is available again.

FIX: When exporting the Imported PDF after separation, the export succeeded but also generated red critical export error “Could not find file ‘C:\\ProgramData\\CaptureBites\\Programs\\MetaServer\\Data\\Documents\\2019\\11.06\\16.57.24.850\\Created\\Files*1.pdf*'”. This is now fixed.

FIX: Index values were not allowed in the subject of Email Alerts anymore.

FIX: Separation on Last Page: Extracted data from the last page was taken over by the next document. That data belongs to the last page’s document not to the next document. This is now correctly handled.

FIX: VALIDATION NAVIGATION THROUGH RESERVED AND UNRESERVED BUTTONS: Next, Prev Doc and Next Skipped and Prev Skipped only browsed through reserved and skipped unreserved. Now, all reserved and unreserved are cycled through with prev. and next document buttons.

FIX: “Convert Email Body / URL” action  is renamed to “Convert Email Body” and Convert URL option is now removed from the setup because this is not yet implemented.

NEW: CONFIGURABLE NUMBER OF ACTIVE SEARCHABLE PDF QUEUES: 1,2,3 or 4. Default is 4 queues.  If 4 queues overload your system and pushes the CPUs to 100% continuously, reduce the number of queues to reduce the CPU load. If you also want to output the searchable PDFs in the same sequence as they were imported, reduce the number of queues to 1.

ENHANCEMENT: SEARCHABLE PDF: Better memory management when converting 600 DPI scanned PDFs to searchable PDF.

FIX: Some electronic PDFs reported “Invalid paper size”. This is now fixed with the inclusion of DevEx, 19.1.7.

FIX: If an index field contained more than 1 word group (in other words, containing TABs) and was used in an export file name, illegal characters such as “<” and “>” in the second or higher word groups were not substituted with legal characters, causing export errors.

ENHANCEMENT: IMPROVED FILE INDEX UPDATE PROCESS: MetaServer is able to update a CSV or XML file index. We now update the index as a TMP file first before updating the main file. This avoids corrupt index files when MetaServer is suddenly interrupted because of a power failure.

ENHANCEMENT: FILE INDEX RECOVERY AFTER POWER FAILURE: If MetaServer is in the middle of updating a file index and the server crashes because of a power failure, the file index may be damaged. This is now detected and repaired by MetaServer when the next document updates the file index. If some index lines are lost during the recovery process, then this is reported in the Server Tab and Errors tab with instructions how to recover those lines from the last written version of the file index.

FIX: WHEN PUBLISHING CHANGES TO A WORKFLOW WITH PASSWORD PROTECTED PDFs IN THE QUEUE, the passwords as defined in the export action were not applied causing errors. This is now fixed.

FIX: DESKTOP STOP AND RESTART BUTTONS: We stopped installing the MetaServer folder containing Stop/Restart buttons etc. We now install this folder again.

ENHANCEMENT: SPECIAL METASERVICE LOGIN SETTINGS ARE PRESERVED: When installing a new version of MetaServer or a workflow, the MetaServer Service is just stopped and restarted at the end of the installation process.

Previously, the MetaServer service was completely uninstalled and re-installed. This caused special login settings, if defined,  in the MetaServer Services panel to be wiped out. The only way to uninstall the MetaServer service completely, is by doing an Uninstall via the Windows Control panel.

ENHANCEMENT: REMOVED DESKTOP STOP AND RESTART BUTTONS: We removed the need for the desktop buttons to restart MetaServer. We normalized the functionality between desktop buttons and server tab and you can now do a restart directly from the Administration Client’s Server Tab.

ENHANCEMENT: IMPROVED PUBLISHING PROCESS IF DOCUMENTS ARE IN THE QUEUE: If you make changes to a workflow, we now check if there are documents in the queue for that specific workflow and only if there are such documents. We then prompt to apply the changes to those documents or not. Before, we just checked presence of documents in the queue regardless the workflow to show the prompt.

ENHANCEMENT: EXPORT TO FOLDER ACTION – BETTER HANDLING IN CASE OF PATH TOO LONG: If the path or file name is too long or the export fails because of a windows OS error, the document is moved to the errors tab. We also add file info (path, name) to the error to help resolving the issue.

About Windows path and file name length limitations:

– The folder path including all back-slashes and including the trailing back-slash cannot exceed 248 characters. This is because Windows automatically reserves space for a 12 character MS DOS file name 12345678.EXT. This limitation is the same for drive letter paths and UNC paths (starting with \\\\SERVER_NAME).

– The total length of path and file name including all back-slashes and *.extension cannot exceed 259 characters.

ENHANCEMENT: IMPROVED HANDLING OF CLIENT EXCEPTIONS: When an exception error occurs, log info is registered in “C:\\ProgramData\\CaptureBites\\Programs\\Admin\\Data\\Log” or “C:\\ProgramData\\CaptureBites\\Programs\\Validation\\Data\\Log” depending on the Client generating the error.

ENHANCEMENT: ADDED SCAN RESOLUTION PROPERTY TO ERRORS TAB: We added the scan resolution of the selected PDF page in the Properties panel of the error tab. If the PDF page is text based, the resolution property indicates that the PDF page does not contain an image.

ENHANCEMENT: CONVERT TO FORMAT / CONVERT TO BLACK & WHITE: We added a new option “[  X  ] Do not convert pages below [ 100  ] DPI”.  By default the option is OFF and everything is converted. Conversion to Black & White works fine above 150 DPI but below, small text can become unreadable. Now you have the option to conditionally convert to Black & White based on the resolution of the image.

ENHANCEMENTS: MORE EFFICIENT HANDLING OF DB LOOKUP IN VALIDATION: Connections are saved, to avoid reconnecting every time. If using the connection fails, it is closed and re-opened. If re-opening fails, then the error is reported like before.

Up to 50 connections are saved (and re-used). When the limit is reached, all connections not used for more than a month (exactly 31 days) are closed.

FIX: It was possible to create multiple fields with the same name in prior versions.This could cause unpredictable results. You cannot create multiple fields with the same name anymore.

FIX: In a Set Field Value rule, if a condition like “If Field is blank” was set, it was possible to leave the field to be evaluated blank.  It is not possible anymore to leave the field selection blank in a Set Field Value rule.

NEW: VALIDATION – SELECT TEXT – DEFAULT TOOL OPTION: When you select the Select Text tool, there is now an additional sub option, called “Default tool”. It’s a drop down with two options:
1) Select Text
2) Zoom

The default is “Select Text” but you can now also make the Zoom tool the default tool when navigating in a field where the Select Text Tool feature is enabled.

Selecting the Zoom tool as the default avoids that less experienced operators select and overwrite text by accident.

ENHANCEMENT: Retry when OCR extraction fails:
– it first retries after a sleep of 200 milliseconds
– it this fails, it retries after a sleep of 500 milliseconds
– if this fails, it reports the error code returned by TOCR: “Failed to initialize OCR engine: ” + tocr error

ENHANCEMENT: Admin and Operator Desktop program icons and the MetaServer folder with server start, stop and status icons are now available for all users on their desktop.

ENHANCEMENT: DE-ACTIVATE INSTALLED METASERVER WORKFLOWS: We added an option to the CTRL+SHIFT OPTIONS mode in the installer to de-activate installed workflows.

[X] De-activate installed workflows.

This is useful when you want to install a workflow from an external source and you are not sure what folders it is watching. To avoid conflict, you can now de-activate the workflows in the installer before installing.

FIX: CALCULATE NUMBER RULE: Adding a blank value to for example 10,00 resulted in nothing.  Blanks are now considered as 0 automatically. and 10.00 + Nothing = 10.00

FIX: EXPORT TO FOLDER: When a folder ends with a space, a red error occured. “Export folder is not reachable” because leading and trailing spaces in folder names are not supported in Windows. We now autocorrect spaces preceding or following a / or \\ (folder separators) in an export path.

FIX: EXPORT TO EMAIL: Enable/Disable action: When opening the action again after disabling, the fields were not grayed out.

FIX: FORMAT DATE & TIME: Time formatting did not accept 12:10 PM.  If you tried to convert 12:10 PM with an input mask { Time, hh }:{ Time, mm } { Time, tt } and an output mask { Time, HH }'{ Time, mm } you got an error.

 

TASK SCHEDULER – USE CASE 2:
Another use case of the TASK SCHEDULER is the automatic deletion of outdated processed document backup files. Use the “Delete Old Files” action for that. Just select the folder that needs to be cleaned up and set the minimum age of the file in days to be selected for deletion. The date and time we evaluate is the “Last write date/time” also known as “modified” date/time.

Optionally you can delete empty subfolders. With a trigger, you can automate this process on a daily schedule.

If an outdated file or empty folder cannot be deleted because it is locked by another application, the deletion is skipped and the file and folder is left behind for the next round of your “Delete Old Files” task.

If the MetaServer is switched OFF when a trigger should occur it will be executed as soon as the MetaServer is switched ON. The logic is as follows: If trigger current trigger date(=current date)/trigger time is more recent than last date/time ran (as registered in the task’s .CBMSTask config file) and if current date/time is more recent than or equal to trigger date(=current date)/trigger time, then RUN.

As a safety measure to avoid catastrophic mistakes in the setup, we do not allow any paths containing a file with one of these extensions: “.bat”,”.bin”,”.com”, “.dll”,”.exe”,”.lib”,”.ocx”. This makes it impossible to delete folders like the Programs folder, the C:\\ root, the Windows folder etc. When you try to define such a folder, you will get an error “This folder is not a data folder”.

With the Run Now function, you can run a task at any moment. The status bar will show the progress of the task in 3 stages: Scheduled at HH:mm:ss, Running at HH:mm:ss and Finished at HH:mm:ss.

NEW: FIND WORD and VALIDATION: NEW TYPE: Czech & Slovak PID (Personal Identification Number, Rodné číslo) check. Digit 3 and 4 indicate the month of birth and can only be 01 to 12 (for men) or 51 to 62 (for women, month+12).

Link to specs: https://webdev.zaujimave.info/generator-rodneho-cisla

Example 910322/3987.

Online Check site: https://webdev.zaujimave.info/kontrola-rodneho-cisla

Valid numbers: 9103223987 (male), 7558080167 (female). Invalid: 6146113985 (check digit correct, but position 3 and 4 is not a valid month)

ENHANCEMENT: CONVERT TO BW: An additional option is added to the Convert to BW action: [ X ] Also convert text based PDF pages”. When disabled, text based PDF pages are skipped and not converted to BW. If you want to convert all pages of a PDF to BW regardless its type (both scanned pages and text based), enable this option.

ENHANCEMENT: EMAIL ALERTS: When Email Alerts are switched ON, the Alert icon is now green (previously it was red). If they are OFF, the icon is red (previously it was gray).

ENHANCEMENT: EMAIL ALERTS: If you forget to change the recipient email for the email alerts, a warning message pops-up: “You are using the demo email recipient “change.this.asap@capturebites.net”. Error emails won’t be sent.”

FIX: MARK DETECTION: If Mark Detection was executed on any page that did not exist in the PDF, the action stalled with an Error 1. This is now handled correctly and the rule is skipped for non-existent pages.

FIX: EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS: Even if Email notifications in the Workflow tab were disabled, error emails were sent such as Watched folder is not reachable.

FIX: RESERVED ERROR DOCUMENTS: Reserved documents that ended up in the errors tab could not be deleted and were not displayed in the counter. Now you can manage all errors regardless who they were reserved for.

FIX: HANDLING OF EXPIRED IMAP PASSWORD: If documents ended up in the Error tab because the IMAP email password expired or changed, Email Archiving failed as expected. However, if the documents were reprocessed after adjusting the password, the new IMAP email settings were not taken into account and the Archive email continued failing.

FIX: EXTRACT ACTION ERRORS: Errors related to the Extract action were incorrectly reported.

FIX: REPLACE: Leading and trailing spaces are now trimmed between replaces. Previously this did not happen and occasionally caused unpredictable results.

E.g., replacing BVBA with nothing in:
CaptureBites (Belgium) BVBA

resulted in:
CaptureBites (Belgium)[SPACE] when handed over to the next Replace rule.

This caused issues when trying to remove (Belgium) with a second replace. This is now fixed and replacing BVBA CaptureBites (Belgium) BVBA will result in CaptureBites (Belgium) without a trailing space before handing it over to the next replace.

– NEW: SHOW TIMER WHEN RESTARTING METASERVER FROM DESKTOP: On systems with many documents in the queue, restarting the MetaServer may take several minutes. The restart message now shows a timer, indicating the elapsed time. This gives an indication how long a restart takes on a given system, making it easier to anticipate the remaining restart time during later restarts.

 

– NEW: Guided update process if a difference is detected between the clients and the server:

There are 4 different update scenario’s that are handled gracefully with meaningful messages and a direct link to the correct downloads:

A) Admin Client Version < Server Version

Button [ Download and install the latest Admin client ]

When the button is pressed the installer is downloaded from URL:
https://www.capturebites.com/downloads/CaptureBites_Windows_MetaServer_-_Admin_Client_Base_3.0.exe

The installer starts and the admin client closes so it can be upgraded to the latest version.

B) Operator Client Version < Server Version

Button [ Download and install the latest Operator client ]

When the button is pressed the installer is downloaded from URL:
https://www.capturebites.com/downloads/CaptureBites_Windows_MetaServer_-_Operator_Client_Base_3.0.exe

The installer starts and the admin client closes so it can be upgraded to the latest version.

C) Operator or Admin Client Version > Server Version and the PC = the Server

Button [ Download and install the latest MetaServer and Clients ]

When the button is pressed the installer is downloaded from URL:
https://www.capturebites.com/downloads/CaptureBites_Pack_MetaServer_-_Server_&_Clients_Base_3.0.exe

The installer starts and the clients close so the clients and the MetaServer service can be upgraded to the latest version.

D) Operator or Admin Client Version > Server Version and the PC <> the Server

Please contact your administrator to update your server [SERVER_NAME] with the latest version. You can find the download link on: downloads.capturebites.com

 

– NEW: Find Word / Words from DB – New option located in the field mapping tab on top.

[ X ] If multiple hits, select first hit

Use case: DB with duplicate records now also returns mapped values if this option is switched ON.

The option is switched off by and if there are multiple hits in the database, mapped values are not returned.

 

– NEW: Direct MS SQL DB Lookup and Export: Table list now also shows views.

 

– ENHANCEMENT: Import Email action queue in Server tab, now also shows the watched email address between the brackets to easily check for conflicts between several watched email inboxes.

 

– ENHANCEMENT: We added more Queue levels in the very low range: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 important for load balancing.

 

– ENHANCEMENT: Validation and Organizer Tabs: A new option in the Validate and Organizer action allows to enable or disable the Reject function. If disabled (default is OFF for new workflows), the reject function is hidden in the organizer and validation tab.

 

– ENHANCEMENT: REQUIRED READ-ONLY FIELDS: It is now possible to make a Read-Only field required.

Use case: If you look for an important but meaningless unique client id via Client Name in a DB for example. The Client Name is not required and is actually a means to an end to search for the client ID.

The operator will never lookup through the client id, because it is meaningless, so it is a read-only field.

But if the operator does not look up a client id through the optional Name, it will be blank and the document should not be valid despite the client id being blank.

We don’t want to make the client id editable to avoid that an operator starts typing something in the meaningless id field.  The client id field can only be filled by looking it up through other fields.

 

– FIX: EMAIL TIME ISSUE – Email time was always expressed in GMT which did not match the time reported in an email client such as Outlook.  Email time is now  expressed in local time just like in email clients like Outlook and Gmail.

 

– FIX: VALIDATION SKIP ERROR: Validation Skip function showed an error when doing Next Skip: “Index was outside the bounds of the array.”

 

– FIX: RESERVE WAS CASE SENSITIVE: Validation, organizer and error counters were indicating 0 documents if the reserved user was in a different case than the case when the user logged in.   For example user logs in as scan-user and documents are reserved for SCAN-USER, then reservation worked correctly but validation, organizer and error counters were showing zero.

 

– FIX: PUBLISH – DELETE DOCUMENTS IN QUEUE: When you had documents in the export queue stalled because of an unreachable export path and you made corrections to your workflow. When you published the updated workflow with the option to delete all documents in the queue for that workflow, then the documents queue-ed for export were not deleted.

 

– FIX: PDF WITH CORRUPT FONT made MetaServer’s separate action crash: The issue surfaced when the first 2 pages of an email PDF were moved to the end of the document in organizer. The problem came from one of the pages in the PDF having a corrupt font. Update to DevEx 19.1.4.19177 fixed the problem.

 

– FIX: RESTART METASERVER FROM DESKTOP ISSUE: Restarting MetaServer from the desktop (aka from the command line) reprocessed document sets from the beginning if one of the documents in the set was open in an Operator client.

 

– FIX: EXPORT TO FOLDER – CREATE FOLDER IF IT DOES NOT EXIST: The problem was that we checked the existence of the destination folder in the preliminary check, but we did not check again when we did the actual copy of the PDF / Metadata File. We know do check this and create the folder if it does not exist. Now, when the copy throws a DirectoryNotFoundException, it’s handled as an “Export folder is not reachable”.

– FIX: VALIDATION: CUSTOM MESSAGE SHOWED AFTER STANDARD ERROR MESSAGES : The custom error message only showed after the field was completely entered, before that the standard min length message was displayed.  The custom error message, if defined, now shows as soon as you start entering data in the field.

– FIX: ORGANIZER: AFTER DELETING A PAGE, THE NEXT PAGE WAS NOT SELECTED: When deleting a page, the next page was not really selected (although highlighted), and if you wanted to delete that page as well, you needed to click it first.

– FIX: SEPARATION: ON SOME ELECTRONIC PDF FILES, SEPARATION FAILED WITH AN ERROR MESSAGE. Fixed by upgrading DEVEX version 18.1.6.0 to 19.1.3.19149

– FIX: Some PDFs did not scale correctly in the setup and validation viewers.  We added 2 checks to validate the image covering the page to determine the page dpi

1) the image aspect ratio must be within 1% of the page aspect ratio
2) the image dpi must be >= 100 and <= 600

In the sample PDF of the incident both checks failed:

1) page aspect ratio: 1.41423 (1% limit = 1,4 and 1,42837)
image aspect ratio: 0.33067

2) image dpi 9,91

– FIX: DELETING A DOCUMENT IN THE ERROR TAB CAUSED ERROR: Deleting a document in the error tab produced an error “Unable to delete directory”

– ENHANCEMENT: When you restart the server with the icon on the desktop, incorrect documents in the data folder with only Current\\Document.CBMSDocument are not deleted.

– FIX: EXTRACT – CALCULATE TIME SPAN: Negative spans inconsistency: If the Second Date is more recent than the First Date then the calculated time span was only negative if expressed in hh:mm:ss format. All formats now express a negative value in this case.

– FIX: EXTRACTION – CALCULATE TIME SPAN: Wrong result: If you calculated a Time Span in h:mm:ss output format and if you calculated the time span between 17:00:00 (HH:mm:ss format) and 18:00:00, then the result was 1:00:00 which was correct, but the span between 17:01:00 and 18:00:00 resulted in 1:59:00 (should be 0:59:00).

– FIX: FIND WORD: Accept words from database using integers: If you looked up via an INTEGER type field, the mapping did not work and mapped fields remained blank. The “check if the looked up value existed in the database” worked correctly, but the mapping failed.

– FIX: CONVERT TO SEARCHABLE PDF: The redundant entry “Orientation & Script Detection Data” in the language selection list has been removed.

– FIX: VALIDATION DB LOOKUP: “Sort” caused an error: When trying to sort a database drop down list, an error occured.

– FIX: VALIDATION DB LOOKUP: Last lookup always opened: The last drop down always opened with a cascading lookup.

– FIX: OPERATOR CLIENT – REJECT REASONS: There were only 8 (1-8) reject reasons in version 3.0.6, now there are 10 possible reject reasons again with shotcuts CTRL+1, CTRL+2 etc. Reject reason 10 uses CTRL+0 as its shortcut.

– FIX: ADMIN CLIENT: In the Workflows tab, delete the last action of a workflow failed.

– FIX: DATE/TIME FIELDS NOT REPORTED WITH ODBC: In version 3.0.6, Export to DB with ODBC did not report Date/Time fields anymore.

– NEW: OUTGOING EMAIL ACTIONS: All setups with SMTP settings now have a new option:

[ X ] Check internet connection.

Disable this option if you only send internal email not requiring an internet connection, otherwise leave this option enabled.

– NEW: Help buttons added for the following actions and rules:

Extract – Find Word with Type
Extract – Find Line with Mask / Words
Extract – Set Field Value
Extract – Reserve
Edit – Calculate Date
Edit – Calculate Number
Select Server Window
Select By URL

– FIX: WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT: ACTIVATE ALL AND DEACTIVATE ALL DID NOT MAKE APPLY BUTTON ACTIVE:  If you used the Deactivate All or Activate All button, the Apply button remained gray. Only when you selected or unselected individual workflows, the Apply button became active.

– FIX: Extract Text: When you, for example, extracted page 4 up to the last page (page range 4–1) and if these pages were not present, for example in a 3 page document, then an error 1 occurred.

– ENHANCEMENT: Document number appears in the Document list: The Test Documents Drop Down List and Browse Document Thumbnails now display the document number in front of each PDF file name for easier reference.

– FIX: Export to SAP R/3: After 1 document being uploaded to SAP, the MetaServer service got unloaded. This is now fixed.

– FIX: AFTER A LICENSE ACTIVATION, WORKFLOWS REMAINED HIDDEN: After you activated the MetaServer license, the workflows were not immediately visible. You needed to reconnect to the server of restart the Admin client to see them.

– FIX: ACTION AFTER DELETE WAS NOT CALLED IF DOCUMENT WAS DELETED FROM DOCUMENT LIST: If you defined an action after Deleting a document (like export to a Deleted Documents folder) then this action was only called when you deleted a document with the Delete button in the ribbon in the Organizer or Validation ribbon. It did not call the action when documents were deleted from the list.

– FIX: REJECT REASONS ARE NOW NUMBERED FROM 1: Reject reasons in the Setup UI of the Organizer and Validation actions were numbered from 0 and should have been numbered from 1 because the first reject reason is considered as 1 in the Validation drop down and in the { Reject Reason Number } variable.

– FIX: TABS IN 2D BARCODE VALUES ARE NOW CORRECTLY HANDLED: If a Barcode contained real TAB characters, we now substitute them with the MetaServer TAB character format represented by the → symbol.

– FIX: CORRECT HANDLING OF CORRUPT PDF ATTACHMENTS: Corrupt email attachments were not handled. They are now moved to the Errors tab similar to corrupt PDFs imported from a Folder.

– FIX: A document originating from an email in the errors tab that was deleted did not trigger email archival.

– NEW: The Find Word rule will now find words across multiple lines. For example, if you have a text like:

Solutions for SMBs from CaptureBites
Software Development are easy to configure.

Notice how “Software Development is on another line than “CaptureBites”.

If you try to Find “CaptureBites Software Development” with a Find Word rule in that text block, it will now find it. Previously, Find Word could only find words in the same line. This is useful to find key phrases and lookup the matching document type corresponding with that key phrase.

– NEW IN ERRORS TAB – CORRUPT PDF HANDLING: When an invalid PDF is imported and detected, it is now reported in the Errors Tab. The viewer shows a red image with the words: “FILE NOT VALID”. The invalid file can be saved with a new Save As function in the Errort tab.

– NEW IN ERRORS TAB: SAVE AS FUNCTION: If you want to share a PDF that was moved in the Errors tab, you can now save it on your system with the new Save As function. By default the proposed pdf file name is the original file name of the imported file.

– NEW: Week Number – Format Date / Time: We introduced a new output format – Week Number: { Date , W } and { Date , WW } For example 9 JAN 2019 would generate week 2 or 02 (WW).

The 1st week of the year is determined according to the ISO convention: The basic principle is that a week needs to contain all days of the week from Monday through Sunday. This means that sometimes the last week of a year contains days of the following year or the first week of a year contains days of the previous year. According to ISO conventions, the first week of a year is the week with a Thursday in that year. For example 1 JAN 2017 (a Sunday) belongs to week 52 of the year 2016 and 31 DEC 2018 (a Monday) belongs to week 1 of 2019

– NEW: Distribute action Help button is implemented.

– FIX: Find Word with Accept words from DB: The Match whole word option now triggers an exact match lookup in the database to find mapped fields. Before it did a START WITH search sometimes causing { Multiple hits } in the mapped fields.

– FIX: When the workflow is active, and the button is red, the tooltip now indicates “Deactivate Workflow” instead of “Activate Workflow”. When it’s OFF (gray) the tooltip indicates “Activate Workflow”.

– FIX: When a corrupt file was imported it stayed behind in the workflow’s the watched folder but was also added to the internal document structure. When you then restarted the server, it failed to restart and was never found until the corrupt documents were removed from the internal document structure in C:\\ProgramData\\CaptureBites\\Programs\\MetaServer\\Data. In this version, MetaServer cleans up these issues automatically and correctly starts. When new corrupt files are placed in the watched folders, they are now moved to the Errors Tab for further inspection.

Each tab has an online help link explaining all functions:

ADMINISTRATION CLIENT TABS:
1) Server
2) Workflows
3) Queues (planned for future release)
4) Organizer
5) Validation
6) Errors

OPERATOR CLIENT TABS:
1) Organizer (can be hidden if not in use)
2) Validation
3) Errors (can be hidden if solving errors is reserved to admins)

– NEW: WORKFLOWS TAB – WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT: The Workflow management button opens a dialogue to multi-select workflows to delete, activate or deactivate multiple workflows at once.

– NEW: MANUALLY CONNECTING CLIENTS TO THE SERVER: You can now enter the connection URL of the MetaServer manually in the Operator and Administration Clients if they run outside the server’s domain. The URL is accessible by pressing the menu option of the Select Server button. First copy it from the client running on the server and copy it in the Server URL setting on the client(s) outside the domain. This manual connection method is only required for clients running outside the server’s domain. For clients in the same domain as the server, the MetaServer is automatically detected as before.

– NEW: ERRORS TAB: The Errors tab shows any documents in an error state. For example documents that could not be exported because a database was not available. You can view the documents, read detailed error information and after you have resolved the problem, you can retry the failed action or reprocess the error document from the beginning after resolving the issue causing the error. You can also delete error documents from the list in case they cannot be resolved (corrupt unreadable PDF files for example).

The Errors tab also indicates if a document belongs to a document set or not. A document set originates from a single PDF file containing multiple documents that has been separated in multiple documents using separation rules or using the Organizer. If a document belongs to a document set, you have the choice to reprocess the whole document set that the error document belonged to or to just retry the failed action on that particular document.

Through a new group of client settings in the server tab, you have the option to expose or hide the Errors tab in the Operator Client to allow or not allow validation operators to resolve errors.

– NEW: ORGANIZER THUMBNAILS: We introduced a 3rd, Large size type of thumbnail.

– NEW: VALIDATION: DB LOOKUP – “Search as you type” option: MetaServer has always searched records as you typed. This decrease keyboard responsiveness if you lookup in very large tables. You can now disable Search as you type. With the feature disabled you can type in a lookup field and the search will only be triggered when hitting the ENTER key or pressing OK in the Validation Tab.

– NEW: SERVER TAB CLIENT OPTIONS SECTION: You can customize the Operator Client’s experience by hiding or exposing skip functions, hiding or enabling the Organizer tab, hiding or exposing the Errors tab.

– NEW: EXPORT TO WORKFLOW: The Export to Workflow action allows to send documents from one workflow to another preserving all metadata. Ideal for complex uses cases with multiple format output, multi level document separations, document classification etc.

– NEW: DISTRIBUTE ACTION: We were missing a way to export to different workflows conditionally in case we want to classify documents first with a classification workflow. This action makes this possible.

The Distribute action can send a document to one of many workflows or other actions. It is an easy way to create a Document Classification workflow distributing documents to their correct workflow depending on their document type.

This new action allows to send a document to any action in the same workflow conditionally based on for example an index field value like “Document Type”. The field of the value is set in previous extraction or validation actions.

The Distribute Setup has a select field drop down to select a field like “Document Type” holding one of the conditions defined in the list of different possible conditions.

When processing a document, the next action matching the condition value will be selected.

If the field value does not match any of the conditions, the { Default } next action will be selected.

If you name a condition “invalid”, “reject”, “spam” or “delete”, then the action is marked red in the graph and workflow graph.

– NEW: IMPORT FROM FOLDER option to wait x seconds before importing a file. The option is called “Import [xxx] seconds after file creation”. By default the time is set to 0 seconds. The feature is inspired by the fact that some MFP devices (we experienced it with Konica-Minolta MFPs) write PDF files gradually in the destination folder and does not always lock them while being written. This can cause a partial import of a PDF file by MetaServer generating a corrupt PDF file. By setting a delay before importing the file, the MFP can correctly finish the PDF file.

– ENHANCEMENT: F5 can now be used as a keyboard shortcut to refresh lists: like the Document List in the Organizer and Validation tabs, the actions list in the Server tab and the Document Counters List.

– ENHANCEMENT: ORGANIZER VIEWING: If the user clicks on the separator, the first page is now loaded in the single page viewer instead of nothing.

– ENHANCEMENT: ORGANIZER AND VALIDATION – CLOSE DOCUMENT: You can now close a document with a dedicated Close button to make it available for another station to organize/validate.

– ENHANCEMENT: SERVER TAB SELECT WORKFLOWS: The Select Workflow function is now also available in the Server tab. You can use to filter the Import actions in the list. This is useful when you have many workflows on a demo system to reduce the long import action list and only show the relevant ones during demos.

– ENHANCEMENT: HELP IN ALL TABS: A help button is added to each tab opening an online help page explaining all functionality for each of the tabs.

– ENHANCEMENT: The MetaServer version is now included in error emails.

– ENHANCEMENT: Convert to Black & White: Additional info about the conversion process when you press Test with following indications:
If the original contains a scanned page: Yes / No (If No, there is nothing to convert to B&W)
If the original image is black & white: Yes / No (If Yes, the conversion is skipped because the image is already B&W)
If the PDF was converted to B&W: Yes / No

– ENHANCEMENT: We do not allow two separation actions in a single workflow path anymore because, in case of errors, documents can be lost. When publishing such a workflow, an error message shows and recommends to split the workflow using the new Export to Workflow action. For more info how to send documents from one workflow to another, refer to the Export to Workflow online help page.

– ENHANCEMENT: The Exchange error: “Export to Email: Temporary server error. Please try again . PRX5 (451). is now considered as a recoverable error (orange). The Export to Email action will be retried until it works again.

– FIX: Validation: When the field forced a zoom mode, like “fit to width”, the corresponding fit button was not correctly selected when the document was opened in Validation.

– FIX: Extraction Action: The sequence number of the extraction rule in the title of its setup was wrong. If you opened an extraction rule of an extraction action the sequence number in the tile bar was not correct. For example rule 1 was displayed as rule 0 in the title bar or rule 22 ias rule 21.

– ENHANCEMENT: You can now sort the Document list on any of the columns by clicking on a column header.

– ENHANCEMENT: Online MetaServer help now shows breadcrumbs and you can easily navigate to the main help page from any specific help page.

To make a black and white TIF, you should first convert to B&W, then convert to tiff to get a Processed TIF in B&W.

If you want to create different PDF versions, for example one in Color and one in Black and White, then import color PDFs, then export the PDF as is using an Export to Folder action, then Convert to Black & White with a Convert Format action, then export the processed PDF with another Export to Folder action.

– NEW: Auto-recovery from offline import and export folders and from timed-out SMTP Servers

– ENHANCEMENT: Import from Folder and Export to Folder: When import or export folders are not accessible, MetaServer retries until the folder is available again. This makes MetaServer auto-recover in case a NAS drive is unavailable or after an unstability in the network or if an external drive was switched off and eventually switched on.

Import folders are tested every 10 seconds. Export folders are retried every 10 seconds if there are documents to be exported to that folder.

If network folders are involved, the retry process works in 2 stages, it first tries to reconnect the off line network drive and then retries the import from or export to that folder.

– NEW: New option in Network Folders setup: [ X ] Send warning if not available for [ 10 ] minutes.
When unavailable, an email message will be sent after 10 minutes. 10 minutes is the default but this warning delay can be adjusted between 1 and 999 minutes. Only one warning is sent per offline period.

Example:

An import folder is offline because the network attached storage (NAS) was switched off. After 10 minutes MetaServer sends an error message. If the NAS continues to be offline, the warning is not repeated to avoid a spam effect in case a folder is offline for a long period.

After 1 hour it gets finally online again. MetaServer resumes importing automatically.

5 hours later it is offline again. 10 minutes later a warning is sent. Etc.

For exporting documents, the cycle gets renewed per document. Per document there will only be one warning sent after the warning time expires (default 10 minutes).

– ENHANCEMENT: Recovery from a timed-out smtp server (outgoing email): Export to Email, Forward Email, Report errors via email all make use of SMTP to send messages. Most SMTP servers set a limit to the number of emails you can send hourly. If you send too many emails in a given period, the SMTP server pauses to enforce the hourly limit. When the SMTP server pauses, MetaServer retries until the SMTP server responds again. MetaServer retries up to 15 times. After 15 minutes MetaServer assumes that there is a critical problem with the configuration or with the SMTP server and generates an error.

– NEW: New check digit types used in Find rules and in Text and DB Lookup Validation check masks.

1) Boleto Bancário (Brazil)
2) Burgerservicenummer (Dutch BSN)
3) Luhn Check
4) Spanish VAT Number
5) South African VAT Number

Luhn Check is a popular check digit calculation used for example in:

– American Express , MasterCard, Maestro and Visa credit card Numbers
– Canadian GST numbers (Tax ID)
– Canadian SIN numbers (Social Security ID)
– Mobile Phone IMEI codes (International Mobile Equipment Identity)

– NEW: Queue info ( i ) in Validation title bar): A refresh button is added to refresh the number of documents in each action.

– FIX: PDFs converted to TIF did not import in Kofax Express correctly because of a redundant tag.

– New Variable: Document/{ Document Dominant Language }: The new version of the OCR engine also detects the dominant language of a document. To detect a language, you need to select it in the language list of the Character Set in the Extract Text rule. The detected language can be used in a field through a Set Field Value rule by setting it equal to { Document Dominant Language }.

– NEW: Server Tab: Network Folders Button: Being a service, MetaServer runs without a logged user account under a special system account. System accounts do not have access rights to shared folders on the network, only user accounts have such rights. This setup makes it possible to define credentials for shared network folders. This gives MetaServer access to import and export to these shared network folders.

The Network Folders button is also available from the Import from Folder and Export to Folder action. You only need to define access to a network folder once. After you have defined access to a network folder, it automatically is accessible from any Import from folder and any Export to folder action.

When you access an MS-Access database through ODBC and the .mdb or .accdb file is located on a network folder, you also need to define access to that network folder using this new function.

– ENHANCEMENT: Export to Folder: Update index file: drastically improved speed

– FIX: Help button now correctly points to https://www.capturebites.com/metaserver/help/Queue Info Button.

We added a small ( i ) button to the title bar buttons on the left side of the help button to display the current queue details. This displays a detailed overview of all documents in the MetaServer queues and lists the number of documents per action.

The Convert to Searchable PDF action has three options:

Option 1: Page(s): Leave the field empty to select all pages. Otherwise, type one or more page numbers or ranges by commas. Negative numbers identify pages starting from the end of the document. For example, if you only want to make the first page and last page searchable, enter 1,-1. If you only want to make the 3 first pages searchable, enter 1-3.

Option 2: Languages: Select the language used in the majority of your documents.  You can select multiple languages, but only do so when you have many documents of all selected languages. If it’s exceptional that you have a document in another language than the main language, only select the main language.

Option 3: To create a searchable PDF, we make use of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. OCR works best on 300 and 400 dpi scans. If you have document scans with a lower resolution than 300 DPI, like 100 or 200 dpi scans, we recommend to use this option to improve the OCR result. This option won’t affect 300 DPI or higher scans.

– NEW:  Set Field: A Line section has been added in the Setup menu of the value, containing:  Line Separator, Line Number and Line Count. Line Number and Line Count are to be used in combination with multi-line values and Line Separator can be used to create multi-line values combining several values.

For example:

If an index field with the name LIST contains these values:
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1979

And you use a Set Field Value rule using this value: { Line Number } of { Line Count }: { Field, LIST },
then the result will be:
1 of 6: 1973
2 of 6: 1974
3 of 6: 1975
4 of 6: 1976
5 of 6: 1977
6 of 6: 1979

If you want to populate a field with several lines like:
RED
GREEN
BLUE

You use a Set Field Value rule with this value: RED{ Line Separator }GREEN{ Line Separator }BLUE

– IMPROVEMENT: Workflow definition: We moved all “Convert” options in a “Convert” menu. Two actions are currently available:

• Convert Email Body/URL to PDF (to be implemented)
• Convert to Searchable PDF

For ODBC databases, we do not have the ability to be accent agnostic and you still need to put all variations. However if one of the variations is found and you map fields, the mapped fields will be correctly populated with the values corresponding with the matching accented value.

– FIX: Separate Document / Process Page: Page rotation was not correct during runtime when combined with page deletion.

– FIX: Database Validation: DB Lookup filters did not work correctly resulting in unexpected results.

– FIX: DBLookup: MsSQL lookup did not work correctly and caused an ERROR [42000] [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Ambiguous column name. This is now fixed.

– FIX: Extract Text: If you set a font size range, the & sign was dropped even if its size was in the font size range.

– FIX: Organizer and Validation Title Bars: The imported PDF file name was always named “0.PDF” in the title bar. The name is now correctly displayed.

There are 4 types of mark detection secenario’s supported by the new mark detection rule:

1) YES/NO options: For example: □ I agree with the general terms of this agreement.

2) One of many choices: For example: I am satisfied with the training: □ Strongly Disagree □ Disagree ■ Agree □ Strongly Agree

3) Many of many choices: For example: What languages do you speak? ■ English □ Spanish ■ French ■ German □ Arabic □ Portuguese

4) Signature Detection: Signatures can be detected by drawing a large zone around the signature zone. If the pixel level is above the defined black level, the signature is considered to be present. This is actually a variant of the YES/NO option.

– Enhancement: Format Number: Allow to put more than 9 digits before decimals (leading zeroes).

– New: Help buttons have been added to:

Backstage Tabs:
– Workflows
– Server

Actions:
– Import from Folder
– Export to Email
– Attach index file setup
– Export to Folder
– Email Index, Format setup
– File Index, Format setup
– Export to Database
– Separate Document
– Extract

Rules:
– Find Line with Line Number
– Find Word Group with Mask / Words
– Change Case
– Date and Time

– Enhancement: All demo jobs are renamed and all start with CB, like in CB – FLOATING DATA and CB – INSPECTION REPORTS, so they are all nicely grouped together in the workflow list.

If you installed a previous version of MetaServer, the demo jobs with the old names will still be there. The fastest way to delete the old worfklows is by going to C:\\ProgramData\\CaptureBites\\Programs\\MetaServer\\Data\\Workflows and delete all the *.CBMSWorkflow workflow files that you don’t want anymore. Restart MetaServer by double-clicking the “Start or restart” MetaServer function in the MetaServer folder on your desktop and the deleted workflows won’t be in the workflow list anymore.

– Enhancement: If MetaServer is not licensed and the client is opened, the prompt now shows a button “Request an Activation Code” leading to a form to apply for a production code in case of a purchased license or a trial code to test the product.

– Enhancement: Help buttons moved next to OK and Cancel for both Separate Document / process Page and Extract actions setup.

– Enhancement: The Extract barcodes rule has additional options to supress noisy backgrounds: MedianFilterBias an MedianFilterLevel. We have a project where transparent QR codes are applied on documents and the text shows through the white parts of the QR Codes. Enabling Median Filter and setting MedianFilterBias to 9 and MedianFilterLevel to 7 suppresses the show through text and makes the QR codes readable. Caution: If you push MedianFilterLevel above 7, you risk eroding the QR code as well, making it unreadable.

– Enhancement: Further improvements to Setup variables menus in all windows where variables can be picked from a Setup menu.

– Enhancement: If MetaServer is not licensed and the client is opened, a prompt opens to request an activation code leading to a form to apply for a trial or to get the activation code in case of a purchase.

– Fix: Export to Email: When you typed an email address in the to field, it searched in the fields, resulting in unexpected behavior. For example if you type claes@… etc. and you have a field called cnpj. It replaced the c of claes with a {. This is now fixed.

– Fix: Date Validation: Replace Text option caused an error when text was selected during validation.

– Prototype integration of Convert to Searchable PDF action. Currently the converted PDF is always output in C:\\CaptureBites\\Searchable with its original file name. In upcoming versions the result will be available as Processed PDF in the export connectors. To access the prototype feature a special installer is required which can be downloaded from here.

– New: Setup windows last used size and position is saved. The main Extract, Validate and Separate action setup windows size sets the size of their child setup windows like: Extract Text Setup, Extract Barcode Setup, Validate Rules Setups, Organize Preview.

– Enhancement: New preformatted date and time formats are added to the metadata pick-lists. Instead having to compose a date format like { Import Date, MM }/{ Import Date, DD }/{ Import Date, YYYY }, you can directly select this from the picklist. This saves many clicks.

– New: Extract Text: Implementation of the options:

“Text based PDF: [ X ] Apply OCR if PDF contains images” and
“Image based PDF: [ X ] Use OCR text layer if present”

Text based PDFs are PDFs that don’t contain an image equal to the PDF page size.

Text PDFs sometimes contain one or more small images containing logos or small font header or footer text. If you want to process these PDFs with OCR, enable the option “Apply OCR if PDF contains images”

Image based PDFs contain an image equal to the page size without any visible text on top of the image.

Image PDFs sometimes contain an invisible searchable OCR text layer. If you want to extract this existing OCR text layer, enable the option “Use OCR text layer if present.

The options are by default Off.

– Enhancement: Report error emails: The email now also includes the path where the document triggering the error is saved:

Example:
The document has been moved to:
Folder: C:\\ProgramData\\CaptureBites\\Programs\\MetaServer\\Data\\Errors\\2018.06.11 11.29.52.047

– Enhancement: The default demo folder when an action is opened the first time is now C:\\META-DEMO\\MFP instead of C:\\MetaServer\\Test Documents. From there you can browse to the correct demo folder which will be remembered next time you open the action.

– Fix: Export to Folder: Following options are not yet implemented and are therefore hidden from the User Interface:

• Create a document per subfolder
• Metadata file

– Enhancement: DB Lookup Setups: Move “Select data source from field” behind a setup button next to the selected data source. The tool tip of the setup button with the three dots is “Setup dynamic database switching…”. We noticed that inexperienced users were selecting a random field for dynamic DB switching even if they didn’t need it, causing runtime errors. By not directely exposing this setting in the main UI and by considering as an advanced settings, this mistake should not happen again.

– Enhancement: Excel ODBC data sources are now hidden for DB Lookup. When using DB Lookup the data source is both accessed by the client and the server. This is not possible with Excel because it is not multi-user and caused an error.

Excel ODBC data sources are still available for export to database actions because in that case only the server accesses the source. You still need to be careful that Excel sheet is not open in Excel, because that locks the Excel sheet for access and causes an error.

– Fix: Find word with accept words from database – If the setup used mapping and the search returned multiple hits, the 1st value in the BB was mapped or caused an error. In case of multiple hits, the mapping now always results in blanks, so the correct record can be selected during validation.

– Two types changes are allowed without having to recreate the complete result:

1) Delete a text extraction rule
2) Add a text extraction rule: Only the additional extraction rule will be excecuted and the result will be added to the saved result file.

– Saved results are saved per test file in the same file as the test file.

For example the OCR test result for
2003-11-24_Fedex.pdf
is saved as
2003-11-24_Fedex.ExtractTxt

– Fix: With a lookup field with DB match required and look up “without confirmation”, selecting a looked up value in the list, would move to the next document without loading that value completely in the index field.

– Fix: When typing in the DB Lookup field the lookup list did not open automatically.

– Fix: Confirm Lookup option forced the user to hit ENTER twice to confirm instead of once when picking the value from the list with cursor keys or mouse.

– Fix: If DB match was not required and a mask was defined to check manually entered values, this mask was ignored and any value could be entered.

– Fix: If you created an new DB Lookup rule, and you unselected Database match required, the Type list defaults to nothing and pressing setup, causes an error. The type now defaults to Mask / Words. An empty type is not accepted anymore.

– Fix: When you entered nothing in the lookup field, and you opened the lookup list, nothing was displayed. If few records, we show them all. If many records, we display the first 1000.

– Fix: DB Lookup Filter Option: Only the UI was implemented but not the functionality. DB Filtering is now fully functional.

– Fix: DB Lookup Filter Option: The Filter icon was incorrect, it was a magnifier and is now changed to a funnel similar to the filter icon in Excel and Access.

– Fix: MsSQL ODBC – MsSQL tables showed some strange prefixes like dbo.tablename.

– ENHANCEMENT: A lookup field with “Update database” ON, validation is complete and where a new record will be added, a message now pops up: A new [lookup_field name]: [new_field_value] will be added to the [DB Name] database. Are you sure? YES / NO (default is NO). If Yes, the record is added and validation moves to the next document. If No, the record is not added, and the cursor jumps back to the lookup field.

– New: Admin: New server setting: “Queue limit”. The default is 1000. And the maximum accepted value is 25000. The 25000 limit has been tested on our systems and works without problems on a machine with sufficient memory (8GB+) and documents with a standard number of metadata excluding any full text fields. We noticed a considerable drop in performance after 30000 documents in the queue. This is the reason why we have set the limit to 25000.
Although you can theoratically set the queue limit to 25000, we recommend to set the value that you practically need and consider the following when setting the queue value:

The queue value acts as a buffer. Imagine you set it to 5000. That means it stops importing after 5000 documents, but as soon as you validate and a document is exported and exits the workflow, MetaServer will import again until it reaches the buffer level. So, in practice a queue limit or buffer of 5000 is already a lot. If 5000 or less works for you, don’t set it higher.

Each document in the queue also stores all extracted values. So if the documents also have an index field with the full text of the first page for example, then the workable limit is reduced to about 10000 documents or less (depending how many pages of full text you extract and how much memory your systems is equippend with) in the queue.

Often full text fields are used for temporary storage and to extract specific values from the full text. In that case make sure you clear the full text field with a Set Field rule at the very end of your extraction rules to get rif of this redundant information throughout the whole workflow. If you clear the full text field(s) before Validation, the queue limit can be set to a higher value closer to the limit of 25000.

The queue limit sets the maximum number of documents queued for processing. Once this number is reached importing of additional documents is paused until documents are exported and make place to import additional ones. We recommend to keep the value at its default of 1000.

Only increase the value when you want to extract data from a lot of documents overnight to queue them up for validation during day time.

– New: Open Document: Added an option to list more items (up to 9999) – Default is 1000. This setting is remembered per station. Listing more than 1000 items can take a long time. We recommend to keep the list size equal to 1000 or less.

– Enhancement: Export to Folder: FTP mode: Update CSV works in the same way as exporting to local disk.

– Enhancement: Export to Email: A body can now be configured if a “File source” is selected, even when “[ ] Attach files” is not selected, resulting in an email with no attachment but with a body which can contain metadata of the not attached document.

– New: Admin: New server setting: “Queue limit”. The default is 1000. And the maximum accepted value is 25000. The 25000 limit has been tested on our systems and works without problems on a machine with sufficient memory (8GB+) and documents with a standard number of metadata excluding any full text fields. We noticed a considerable drop in performance after 30000 documents in the queue. This is the reason why we have set the limit to 25000.
Although you can theoretiically set the queue limit to 25000, we recommend to set the value that you practically need and consider the following when setting the queue value:

The queue value acts as a buffer. Imagine you set it to 5000. That means it stops importing after 5000 documents, but as soon as you validate and a document is exported and exits the workflow, MetaServer will import again until it reaches the buffer level. So, in practice a queue limit or buffer of 5000 is already a lot. If 5000 or less works for you, don’t set it higher.

Each document in the queue also stores all extracted values. So if the documents also have an index field with the full text of the first page for example, then the workable limit is reduced to about 10000 documents or less (depending how many pages of full text you extract and how much memory your systems is equippend with) in the queue.

Often full text fields are used for temporary storage and to extract specific values from the full text. In that case make sure you clear the full text field with a Set Field rule at the very end of your extraction rules to get rif of this redundant information throughout the whole workflow. If you clear the full text field(s) before Validation, the queue limit can be set to a higher value closer to the limit of 25000.

The queue limit sets the maximum number of documents queued for processing. Once this number is reached importing of additional documents is paused until documents are exported and make place to import additional ones. We recommend to keep the value at its default of 1000.

Only increase the value when you want to extract data from a lot of documents overnight to queue them up for validation during day time.

– New: Open Document: Added an option to list more items (up to 9999) – Default is 1000. This setting is remembered per station. Listing more than 1000 items can take a long time. We recommend to keep the list size equal to 1000 or less.

– Enhancement: Export to Folder: FTP mode: Update CSV works in the same way as exporting to local disk.

– Enhancement: Export to Email: A body can now be configured if a “File source” is selected, even when “[ ] Attach files” is not selected, resulting in an email with no attachment but with a body which can contain metadata of the not attached document.

– New way of concatenating values with Set Field to address issues with word group separators:

If in the Set Field formula, there is at least 1 object without positional data (no pink rectangle), then TABs around values without positional data (no pink rectangles) are suppressed, other TABs are replaced with SPACE.

Something like:
{WGROUP1→WGROUP2}-{WGROUP3→WGROUP4} (NOTE: – does not have postional data)

becomes:
WGROUP1 WGROUP2-WGROUP3 WGROUP4

Something like:
{WGROUP1→WGROUP2}{WGROUP3→WGROUP4} (NOTE: all elements have postional data)

becomes:
VALUE1→VALUE2→VALUE1→VALUE2

Something like:
{WGROUP1→WGROUP2} {WGROUP3→WGROUP4} (NOTE: the space separator does not have postional data)

becomes:
VALUE1 VALUE2 VALUE1 VALUE2

PREFIX{WGROUP1→WGROUP2} (NOTE: the PREFIX constant does not have postional data)

becomes:
PREFIXVALUE1 VALUE2

PREFIX {WGROUP1→WGROUP2} (NOTE: the PREFIX+SPACE constant does not have postional data)

becomes:
PREFIX VALUE1 VALUE2

{ Workflow Name }{WGROUP1→WGROUP2} ((NOTE: the system value { Workflow Name } does not have positional data)

becomes:
WORKFLOW NAMEWGROUP1→WGROUP2

(we may argue that the TAB in the result should become a space in this case because the string contains an object without positional data. However this is such an exotic case, we’ll leave it as is)

{ Workflow Name } {WGROUP1→WGROUP2} ((NOTE: the system value { Workflow Name }+ SPACE does not have positional data)

becomes:
WORKFLOW NAME WGROUP1 WGROUP2

– New: Set Field: New option: [ X ] Replace tabs by [ ] Default is OFF and default value is nothing. When tabs (word group seperators) are replaced, then only the pink rectangle of the first word group in the set field value is kept.

– Server Tab: The Database “Reload” button is renamed to “Load”: Since database updates are loaded automatically, we renamed the Reload database button to Load database. Because it only serves for loading new databases.

– Publish Worfklow: When deleting documents in the queue, a progress windows shows if there are many documents (>100) in the workflow.

– New: Test Folder: When loading a test folder, all the files in its sub folders are also loaded. This allows for easier testing of sub folder names loaded in a field with a Set Field Rule. Consider the selected Test Folder as the watched folder. Subfolders below are numbered 1, 2, 3 etc. Following dialogue use the new Test Folder logic:

ExtractRuleExtractBarcodesSetup
ExtractRuleExtractTextSetup
ExtractSetup
SeparateDocumentSetup
ValidateDatabaseSetup
ValidateDateSetup
ValidateNumberSetup
ValidateTextSetup

– Fix: Set Field: Extract Segment: If a segment does not exist (ex. segment 3 out of 2 segments), an error occurs “Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection….”. It should return a blank instead.

– New: When you edit a MetaServer CSV database it is reloaded automatically.

– New: MetaServer CSV databases can now also use ; (semi-colon) as delimiter.

– Enhancement: Publish Workflow: Delete Documents action does not restart MetaServer anymore.

– Fix: Combined word groups are correctly output in CSV, XML files, file names, email body text etc. Previously word group seperators triggered the creation of redundant ” characters.

– Fix: Reload Database sometimes stopped working.

– Fix: Document Separation Setup: The document now stays on the selected page if you change rules or open a rule setup. Before it jumped to page 1.

– New: Find Word: From Database: It is now possible to load an ODBC data source from a field to dynamically switch Database in the same workflow.

– New: Validation: Database Lookup: It is now possible to load an ODBC data source from a field to dynamically switch Database in the same workflow.

– New: Document Separation: When previewing separation points during setup, a progress windows pops up showing page Processing page x of y and also indicates the pages where it found the separation points.

– Fix: Document Separation: Index data of first page of document is kept, also when changed during organize.

– Fix: Export to Folder: File Index: Illegal XML characters are now escaped automatically in any index values or variables in the XML when XML is selected as type. These are the five illegal XML characters that are automatically substituted with their escape code:

” replace with: &quot;
‘ replace with: &apos;
< replace with: &lt;
> replace with: &gt;
& replace with: &amp;

-New: Extraction – Edit – Calculate Date to add or subtract a number of days from a date. For example Due Date = Invoice Date + Payment Term in Days.

– New: Extraction – Edit – Calculate Days Between Two Dates to calculate the difference between two dates. The result is an absolute number in days. For example, Due Date – Invoice Date = Payment Term in Days.

– New: Validation – Dates – new Calculated option – This allows to add or subtract a number of days during Validation by pressing a small calculator next to the date field.

– New: Validation – Number – improved Calculated option – It was already possible to add, subtract, divide and multiply values during validation, it is now also possible to calculate the difference between two dates, resulting in a number of days. That is why thisis part of the Number rule, since the result is always a number.

– Fix: Validate Rule (Edit Text): Replace text had no effect on bar code values.

– When a To email address needs to be defined, the value “change.this.asap@capturebites.net” is set to clearly indicate that the email address should be changed.

– New: Validation / Organizer: New Reserve documents mechanism. It is possible to select one or more documents in the Open Documents list and Reserve them for validation. As soon as the documents are reserved they are not accessible by other validation stations anymore unless they are unreserved. During Validation, the Organizer and Validation clients will first cycle through the reserved documents before opening any non-reserved documents.

– When a a document is reserved in the Organizer, the separated documents are also automatically reserved for Validation.

– New: Fields Setup: Show field in open document list. To help selecting documents in the open document list, additional columns showing fields can be defined. For example if you use a sub folder to set a field called “Scanned by”, you can simply a check a box in the Fields Setup to include it in the open document list. Fields with the same name accros worfklows will all displayed in the same column.

– New: Extraction: New Edit / Reserve rule:

This rule makes it possible to auto-reserve unreserved documents based on an index field. The rule is simple to setup: You select an index field holding the windows user name to reserve a document. You can use standard set field rules, replace rules, db lookup etc. to set the value. This rule will only apply if the document is not reserved yet. For example if the document was already manually reserved during Organize, that reservation is not overwritten by this rule. This is the use case to explain this behavior: Unseparated PDFs arrive in one folder sending it to Organizer with a sub folder per user. Single PDFs arrive in another folder with a subfolder per user for auto-reservation and goes straight to extraction. In extraction just before organize the reservation is set based on the subfolder value. For singles, another extraction just before validate also sets the reservation. However if the unsplit document is first split in Organizer and the auto reserve is manually overwritten in Organizer, then the second auto-reserve in Extraction should not overwrite this. Hence the mechanism to not set the reservation if it is already set.

– New: Validation / Organizer: Open Document List: It is now possible to multi-select documents and delete them all from the workflow.

– Improved: Validation / Organizer Title Bar now shows the original subfolders\\file name of the current document.

– New: Validation badge in Taskbar: A counter icon appears on top of the Validation icon in the Taskbar when there is validation or organizer work. NOTE: A small counter on top of an icon in the taskbar to warn the user of pending work is called a badge in MS Windows 10 terminology. The logic is as follows:

– Validation and Organizer Notification edits:

Validation counter = orange

Organizer counter = green

If Validation is active and there are documents to be validated, an orange counter shows the number of documents to be validated.

If Organizer is active and there are documents to be organized, a green counter shows the number of documents to be organized.

If Validation is active and there are no documents to be validated but there are documents to be organized, a green counter shows the number of documents to be organized.

If Organizer is active and there are no documents to be organized but there are documents to be validated, an orange counter shows the number of documents to be validated.

If there are only skipped documents a skipped icons is displayed to indicate pending skipped work. It is Green or Orange depending on what skipped works is pending (Validate / Organized)

– Improved: Redesigned program icons better suited in combination with counter: After installation on a PC with an old version of MetaServer, you need to restart the PC to see the updated MetaServer icons.

– New: New counters in the status bar of validation which indicate:

DOCUMENTS: The total number of all documents in all workflows for the selected MetaServer. This gives an idea of the total load of the server, this number is also indicated in the backstage in the Server tab.

IN ORGANIZER: Total available documents in Organizer for that station (all unlocked unreserved + all reserved documents for that station). This is the same counter as displayed in the taskbar.

IN ORGANIZER SKIPPED: Total available documents in skipped in Organizer for that station (all skipped unlocked unreserved + all skipped reserved documents for that station).

IN VALIDATION: Total available documents in Validation for that station (all unlocked unreserved + all reserved documents for that station). This is the same counter as displayed in the taskbar.

IN VALIDATION SKIPPED: Total available documents in skipped in Validation for that station (all skipped unlocked unreserved + all skipped reserved documents for that station).

All the counters are updated in real time.

– Fix: MS_Status.exe and MS_Organize.exe is now also digitally signed.

– New: Select Workflow button in Validation to select one or more workflows to perform validation.

– New: Find Word Group: A word group is a sequence of words preceeded and followed by a TAB. For example following line contains 3 word groups:

Date: 15 FEB 2018 PO: 987654 Invoice: 123456

The rule also allows to find word groups around a keyword or keywords. You can find word groups below the word Invoice; for example. This is very useful in cases like this:

Date PO Invoice Nr.
15 FEB 2018 987654 123456

In such case, you can find a Word Group containing “Invoice Nr.” and configure the rule to find word groups 1 cm / 0.4 inch below that word group. Resulting in “123456”.

To find the position of a word group in relation to the match, the logic works as follows:

Step 1: Each word group is tagged with 1 of 8 possible location tags (above, below, right above, left, etc.). The centers of the bounding boxes are used to determine the location.

Step 2: Check if the word group is inside the radar (the rectangle around the match) and ignore word groups outside the radar.

For above and below word groups, the distance from the match to the center of the word group is used.
For right above, right and right below word groups, the distance from the match to the center of the left side of the word group is used.
For left above, left and left below word groups, the distance from the match to the center of the right side of the word group is used.

– Included in the installer is an PDF file located in C:\\META-DEMO\\MFP\\FIND WORD GROUP TEST SHEET\\MetaServer Find Word Group Test Sheet.pdf. Use it to experiment with the new Find Word Group rule.

The new Find Word Group rule includes many info tips explaining all the options.

– New: Extraction Setup: Measure Tool: With this tool, you can measure an object on an image. This is useful in combination with the new “Find Word Group” rule to measure distances between word groups.

– New: Extract Text setup: When you draw a zone, the dimensions of that zone are displayed in cm or inches and in pixels.

– New: Status Bar shows selected server

– New: Validation: The Original file name, subfolder(s) and workflow are now displayed in the title bar when opening a document in Validation or Organizer.

– Fix: Format Date: On Brazilian machines the date formatter deducted 1 day of the extracted date.

– Fix: Extraction: Test: Improved zooming, panning and page selection when clicking on the result when testing Extraction rules.

– New document variables for last validation station and user who validated the document.

– After installation of this version, delete the temp folder: C:\\ProgramData\\CaptureBites\\Programs\\Validation\\Data\\Graphs. Many files are automatically created in this folder when editing workflows. The new version only creates the graph files, when you press the Graph button. When a Log sub folder exists in the Graphs folder, also the log files are saved.

– Extract Text Rule. New option “Apply if…” to only extract text if a certain condition passes. For example: Extract Text if field value of field Invoice Number is blank.

– You can now copy the “SMTP Server” settings from one action to another even if those actions are not the same. You can copy /paste SMTP Server Settings between the Report errors setup, the Export to Email action and the Forward Email action.

– For consistencty reason we renamed the variables { Reject Error Label } to {Reject Reason} and {Reject Error Number} to { Reject Reason Number }. These variables are located in the Document category of the Setup menu.

– The Email Subject is now configurable with full use of variables in the “Report error” setup and in the “Forward Email” action.

– The Archive action is now hidden and automatically used when required.

– Workflows: The Graph button now generates a graphical represenation of the selected workflow

– Defective PDFs generates with mobile apps or scan apps that don’t specify a resolution tag are now correcty processed.

– PDF “Page Count” Metadata in Import/Source/File/Page Count is now available.

– Validation: Select Text: Select 2 or more lines of Text in a text field rejected the value with an error. Now the lines are correctly concatenated in the field and accepted.

– Extraction: Test: When a result is selected the viewer now jumps to the correct page where the result is extracted from.