Joeri Paeleman is one of the owners and founders of DMP. As key developer of the DMP FLO Suite software, he's got a thing or two to say about both the technical background, and the ways in which the DMP FLO Suite is implemented by the customers.
For years, DMP FLO Suite has offered the possibility to link easily with other systems. And for quite some time, this integration has included JDF links. But in the past, we often let our customers talk to the vendors of the other software. We offered a framework for the integration, and our customers used that framework to fill in the details themselves. This way production, accounting and logistics systems were linked to the FLO Suite.
But for the 4.0 release of the FLO Suite, we decided to take matters more into our own hands. We sat down and talked to a large number of vendors, and did the research for a lot of standard integrations. Some of them are available already today, others will become available over the next weeks and months. But the most important part is that the tools exist to add new software integrations even more easily than before.
Export Settings
DMP FLO Suite customers can find a new tab in their interface: Settings>Export Settings. This tab contains a lot of pre-defined export formats to link FLO Suite workflows or applications to external tools.
The new screen contains some initial settings which can be used in your workflows. Each of the settings contains a basic export file, for which we have defined a number of variables. Rather than create a single format for each external tool, we tried to create individual export formats based on tasks you might want to execute. This makes things considerably easier for integrators.
And as usual, we don’t think that we will be right all of the time. So it is possible for you to override our formats for a specific server or client. You can add your own variables hardcoded to the XML or JDF file, or add new content altogether.
The variables in the file will be filled from a certain workflow. Individual variables can be created as Extra Fields in the modules of your workflows. Administrators of your workflow can then fill in the necessary information in the relevant modules. And the integrator will use their content later on to export it to the external tool.
The export is also made as easy as possible. Each export format comes with a scaffold, which can be copied by the programmer into the relevant workflow.
The following lines of code would be enough for a developer to link to the capabilities of ClaroSingle for resampling an input asset to 72 DPI.
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dim myExport as new Export(clientID,"ClaroSingle Resampling")
assetPath = assetFLO.Utils.ImagePath(assetID)
'The path to the input image or PDF file.
myExport.variables("inputFile") = assetPath
'Enter 'true' to indicate that the resolution of the output image will be changed, and if so, also provide a value for the 'DPI' variable.
myExport.variables("DPIActive") = "true"
'The output resolution of the image. Will only be used if DPIActive='true'.
myExport.variables("DPI") = "72
myExport.ExportToFile("c:\test.xml")
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