About the Rendition Engine

The Rendition Engine is a software server responsible for transforming documents into another format, such as PDF and HTML. It is based on the Liquent Enterprise Services product, which is built on the Liquent Vista framework and includes the Liquent Vista Java™ API that integrates with Content Engine Publishing when rendering documents into another format.

How the Liquent software works with Rendition Engine servers and Content Engine

The Liquent software (Enterprise Services and Vista framework) is comprised of several COM+ programs that perform various processes, such as retrieving, rendering, compressing, and distributing documents, and managing the processing activities and message queues.

The Liquent software also uses a database to store configuration and job activity information. Any Rendition Engine servers and Content Engine servers that are configured to do transformation Publishing must be able to communicate with the database. The Liquent software on the Rendition Engine server uses ADO to communicate with the database and the Liquent Vista Java API software on the Content Engine server uses JDBC to communicate with the database. There is also communication between the Liquent software on the Rendition Engine servers as well as between them and the Liquent Vista Java API software on the Content Engine servers. This is done with Liquent proprietary TCP/IP socket communication over ports specified in the configuration.

You can use the Liquent Domain Manager program which is available on the Rendition Engine server, to:

Configuration information

The configuration information stored in the database is referred to as the Liquent Vista domain and can be viewed with the Liquent Domain Manager. The Liquent Vista domain specifies repositories, where the "com" repositories represent each actual Rendition Engine server and the Java™ repositories represent Liquent Vista Java API clients, such as each Content Engine server that is configured to do transformation publishing.

A typical configuration consists of one or more Rendition Engine servers connected to one or more Content Engine servers. You can install the Rendition Engine software on the same server as a Content Engine (if it is on a Windows server), but we recommend using a dedicated Rendition Engine server.

For the Liquent software to properly function, Liquent's Windows service named BusinessServiceServer must be started after a reboot. When the service starts, it will start the BusinessServiceManager process which will respond to a rendering request issued from Content Engine Publishing through the Liquent Vista Java API.

Rendering documents

Rendering of a document into another format is broken down into several steps on the Rendition Engine server:

  1. Retrieve Step

    The first content element of the source document is brought over to the Rendition Engine server.

  2. Render Step

    If the document is to be transformed to PDF, then the render step involves using the document's native application to print it to the Liquent PDF Creator printer.

    If the document is to be transformed to HTML and it is a Microsoft Office document, then the render step will use the document's native application's functionality to save the document as a web page to create the HTML file(s).

  3. Zip Step

    Following the previous steps, the resulting files are compressed with the zip step.

  4. Distribute Step

    The zipped result file(s) are passed back to the Content Engine server to become the publication document