How are managed SmallPreview, Thumbnail, Preview in IDM ?

Greetings everyone,

We are exporting documents (photos) to an external application for salesmen based on ContentDocument each time a document is added/changed in IDM.

The standard BOD contains various URLs to get different mime type of the document : Preview, SmallPreview, Thumbnail.

Consultants of the 3rd party product complain about some URLs not returning the image but this kind of icone below:

Some URLs are working fine though for a given document.

I noticed this problem may occur as well in IDM related information widget. But after a few seconds, the photo is properly displayed without doing anything:

wait()...

My questions are :

- how mime types are managed in IDM ? Is it an online conversion starting from original document ?

- How can i make sure that the 3rd party apps will retrieve the photos properly ?

Thanks for your feedback.

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Accepted answers

Legacy Contributor

Even though you have the URL, the thumbnails are only generated upon the first request and then they are generated asynchronously. If the thumbnail doesn't yet exist, the first request for it will return a 202 status and initiate the process of generating it.

What appears to be happening here is that a single request is being made for a thumbnail which has not yet been generated. You need to retry the request. You will continue to receive 202 status until the thumbnail is generated at which point the status will become 200 and the thumbnail will be returned. This is what the Related Information contextual application is doing.

For those URLs that are working, there has been a prior request for the thumbnail from somewhere (likely from the IDM application) and that is why it is available.

All comments

Legacy Contributor

For those URLs that are working, there has been a prior request for the thumbnail from somewhere (likely from the IDM application) and that is why it is available.

Maxime Richard

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for your answer.

The ION API used by the third party application to retrieve the different mime types is:

GET /items/{pid}/resource/{conversion}/stream

According to them, they receive 200 or 201 return codes

I suppose that 201 corresponds to the code when the format is not available yet. I suggest them to loop on the API until they get the 200 code.

m-mitrosilis

Ryan, is there any way for us to provide the thumbnail to IDM, especially for MIME types that IDM can't process? We have this issue with Autocad files and we have the mechanism to provide the images, but no way to link it to IDM to use it.

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