Quickstart
ARender, view any documents, anywhere
What is ARender
ARender is an HTML5 viewer, allowing you to see and annotate 300+ document formats online directly in your browser.
The following browsers are supported:
- Safari 11+
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Edge
- Mozilla Firefox
- Internet Explorer 11+
- Safari Mobile
- Chrome Android
ARender is as well mobile friendly, as we have dedicated interfaces for mobile phones and tablets!
You can try ARender online right now, at this address: https://arender.io/demo
How does ARender work
ARender makes on the fly rendering of documents so that you no longer need to store multiple converted versions of a document in your ECM storage.
If you already possess those renderings, ARender can always make use of them and use the most optimized format for viewing the document.
ARender is built on two components:
- The front end Java Web server (referred as Web-UI server): serves the HTML application, and handle the end user requests.
- The backend Java Server (referred as Rendition server): serves the renditions of documents and many other services using a REST API to the Web-UI server.
If you would like to dive in details on how the rendition server works, a presentation is available as a slideshow.
How does the rendering of a document in ARender work
If an end user wants to consult a document, a request is sent to ARender. The front end server (Web-UI) will then parse the end user request and find IDs, and any additionnal information needed to fetch the document. The document is then sent to the Rendition server for rendering.
If the document is a native format for ARender (PDF, MP4) it will be quickly processed and sent back as (Images of the pages, Video) to the end user.
If the document requires a conversion, ARender will use its detection tools to find what type of document it is and convert it to one of the two native format. It will then be displayed.
The list of supported documents by ARender is extensible, and as long as a tool exist to convert it to one of our target native formats, ARender can handle the document.
How does ARender allows me to annotate documents
ARender uses the XFDF standard introduced by Adobe to produce annotations that are compatible with Adobe format. When you annotate with ARender, your annotations are supported for many versions to come!
This format of storage, is our own internal structure and can be saved either in your ECM storage, or in a local file system, a database, etc… The annotations are therefore never stored directly on your documents and you can always consult the original version. It requires a manual decision and action to produce a new version of a document in ARender in which the annotations are incorporated.
We as well offer exports of our annotations into the native binary format of Adobe, FDF, for wider compatibility. You are not stuck, with ARender, but we are truly glad that you are staying!
How does ARender handle the performance and document caching
By default, and in order to not redo the same work multiple times, ARender stores a small document cache of one hour on the Rendition server.
This cache is automatically deleted and purged. For most use cases, you won’t have to change any values on this cache mechanism as it is sized correctly to your platform capacities.
Please take note that ARender will not produce in this regard a download request for the documents each time a user consult a document. If you wish to make audit trails based on your ECM downloads, please see the remaining of the ARender documentation to understand the Auditing possibilities ARender has to offer, on top of your ECM features.
How can I integrate my ECM with ARender
We have many out of the box integration ready to be used: Alfresco, IBM ICN, ICM, FlowerDocs, and many other custom ECM!
If you do not find in the documentation how to integrate your ECM with ARender, please contact us and we will see with you if this ECM is not already handled by one of the many ARender partners.
If your ECM is made purely custom by your company, you can easily integrate ARender in an Iframe of your ECM, and control ARender using the extended Javascript API (full documentation available).