10 Develop External Processors
The Content Capture feature of Oracle Content Management provides the ability to integrate custom functionality. This custom functionality is referred to as an external processor and is hosted separately from Content Capture.
To connect an external processor to Content Capture, one adds an External Processor Job step in a procedure flow. For details, see Configure External Processor Jobs in the Capturing Content with Oracle Content Management guide. When a batch of documents reaches this step, it is locked to that specific step in the flow. The external processor is then responsible for processing those documents. After the processing of documents is completed, the external processor must inform Content Capture of the processing results for each document, regardless of whether it was completed successfully or failed. If the external processor fails to notify Content Capture it has finished processing a document, Content Capture will eventually time out the processing and fail the batch.
An external processor could do various processing on documents. Perhaps there is an existing application that scans a document for signature blocks to parse out company information. An external processor could wrap that capability enabling it to be called from a procedure flow. Metadata values extracted by the application could then be set into the corresponding Content Capture document’s metadata fields. Or maybe there is an onsite database that contains discount codes for various vendors. An external processor could look up codes by a Content Capture metadata field of the document and set the value in a different metadata field. An external processor could be developed to perform virtually any type of desired processing on a Content Capture document.
The following sections describe how to develop an external processor: