System and method for efficient production of dynamic documents

• US 7,757,169 B2
• Filed: 08/17/2005
• Issued: 07/13/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 02/03/2000
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: XMPie Ltd. (Xerox Holdings Corp.)
• Original Assignee: XMPie Ltd. (Xerox Holdings Corp.)
• Inventors: Aizikowitz, Jacob, Sherwin, Reuven, Roth, Israel
• Primary Examiner(s): HUYNH, CONG LAC T
• Application Number:
  US11/205,195
• Publication Number:
  US 20050278614A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,791 Days
• Field of Search: 715/200, 715/255
• US Class Current: 715/255
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/10 Text processing natural language analysis G06F40/20; semantic analysis G06F40/30; processing or translation of natural language G06F40/40
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/106 Display of layout of documents; Previewing

Abstract

A production system and method for producing a VIPDL output stream from a dynamic document and a recipients list including a data iterator for iterating through the recipients list one record at a time and computing values for each dynamic object in the dynamic document for the record, a document instantiator for creating an instance document for the record, an output generator operating in tandem with the document instantiator for generating code specifying the rendering of the document instance, and a merge component for generating the VIPDL output stream from output of the output generator.

Claims

1. A production system for producing a variable information page description language (VIPDL) output stream from a dynamic document comprising a layout and a plurality of dynamic objects, each dynamic object representing an object having content to be determined based on recipient record data and a recipients list comprising a plurality of recipient records, each recipient record including a plurality of values for respective data fields associated with each respective recipient, said system comprising:

a parts generator for breaking said recipients list into a plurality of parts, each said part including a plurality of recipient records in said recipients list;

a plurality of pipelines, for receiving and respectively parallel processing each of said parts of said recipients list, wherein each said pipeline is to produce values for reusable object definitions based on a application of dynamic objects in said dynamic document to each recipient record in the part of said recipients list being processed;

a plurality of definitions dictionaries for storing values of said reusable object definitions produced by said plurality of pipelines;

a plurality of booklets sections for storing layout information from said plurality of pipelines based on said layout of said dynamic document; and

a merge processor to generate a VIPDL output stream by merging values contents of said reusable object definitions stored in said definitions dictionaries into said layout information in said booklets sections.

2. A method for producing a variable information page description language (VIPDL) output stream from a dynamic document comprising a layout and a plurality of dynamic objects, each dynamic object representing an object having content to be determined based on recipient record data and a recipients list comprising a plurality of recipient records, each recipient record including a plurality of values for respective data fields associated with each respective recipient, said method comprising:

breaking said recipients list into a plurality of parts, each said part including a plurality of recipient records in said recipients list;

parallel processing each of said recipients list parts by producing values for reusable object definitions based on application of dynamic objects in said dynamic document to each recipient record in the part of said recipients list being processed using a plurality of pipelines;

storing values of reusable object definitions produced by said plurality of pipelines in a plurality of definitions dictionaries;

storing layout information in a plurality of booklet sections, said layout information based on said layout of said dynamic document; and

merging values of said reusable object definitions retrieved from said definitions dictionaries into said layout information retrieved from said booklets sections to produce a VIPDL output stream.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising:

receiving a plurality of queries for a set of dynamic content objects; and

collapsing all of said queries into one query, wherein said query is processed for each recipient record on each of said parts of said recipients list.

4. The method according to claim 3, further comprising computing said one query minimizing joins.

5. The method according to claim 3, further comprising computing said one query minimizing re-selections.

6. The method according to claim 3, further comprising the steps of:

caching views generated by queries; and

reusing said cached views.