What's new in SWITCH 07 - tools and technologies

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What's new in SWITCH 07 - Tools & Technologies

Apart from visual and user experience improvements, development on SWITCH 07 also focused heavily on making the underlying technology better and more powerful. The major changes in this area are described in this topic.

Using variables to customize job processing

In SWITCH 06 any customization of job processing had to be done using scripting and as a consequence required PowerSWITCH. This proved to be a quite high barrier for sometimes quite small customizations.

SWITCH 07 introduces variables to bridge that gap; variables can now be specified in many properties of tools and configurators to allow relatively simple customizations to be done without scripting. Variables are available in all SWITCH flavors.

Two examples make it easy to see the power of variables:

In the “subject” property of the mail send tool, variables can be used to insert the name of the job, its size, etc…
The files pane can be customized to show extra information using variables. This even allows to show embedded metadata fields in the file pane as variables have full access to embedded EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata.

Using variables is especially easy due to the “Edit Variables” dialog window where all available variables are shown and explained and where their available options can easily be set.

Logging

The search interface to find specific log messages has been greatly improved in SWITCH 07. On top of that it is now possible to export log messages to a text file or an XML file. All logs can automatically be exported to an XML file daily. Using a flow these XML files could be automatically picked up and processed further by SWITCH.

Problem jobs handling

When a specific job causes a problem, SWITCH moves that job to the problem jobs folder. In SWITCH 07 each flow has its own problem jobs folder and a new folder flow element can be used to specify how problem jobs need to be handled.

If it is suspected that a job caused a problem because of a problem with the flow or one of the components of the flow, it is easy to ask SWITCH to re-try that particular job (without having to manually copy it to the correct location in the flow) after the problem with the flow has been fixed.

Problem processes

SWITCH now makes a difference between problem jobs and problem processes. If a particular process fails (an example would be that the mail send tool fails because there is no network connectivity), the jobs waiting for that tool are no longer moved to the problem jobs folder. Instead SWITCH can be configured to re-try such processes until they succeed. Additionally an administrator can be notified through email if the problem persists.

Opaque metadata pickup

Next to XML, XMP and JDF pickup, SWITCH 07 now also supports picking up any specified file as metadata for a particular job. The picked-up file is moved with the job (just as the other types of metadata) and scripting can be used to access it.

Direct access to internal metadata

If incoming files contain embedded EXIF, IPTC or XMP metadata, that information is immediately available in SWITCH 07. Using variables, this embedded metadata information can be read. This for example makes it possible to show the width and height of images in the files pane or to add the job ID stored in XMP to the subject of an email sent by the mail send tool.

Scripting allows to also write to the embedded metadata, making it possible to update XMP information for example.

Scripting

The scripting capabilities in PowerSWITCH have been substantially extended to support all extra features available in SWITCH 07 (access to embedded metadata and support for variables are two perfect examples).

On top of that, a number of limitations in the scripting capabilities of PowerSWITCH 06 have been lifted. To give just one example, it is now possible to have dependant properties in script elements.

In fact, the scripting API has been extended in such a way that it is now possible to write complete tools or configurators using scripting. If placed in the correct location, these scripts will be loaded into the element pane so that they are available for use in flows using simple drag-and-drop. To the user they are indistinguishable from built-in tools or configurators. A number of tools and configurators in SWITCH are actually written using the expanded scripting API.