Limitations

ICXT has a few known limitations. This document outlines infrastrucural or feature requirements that are out of scope.

PDF Export

The following limitations were identified for the PDF Export module:

Limitations for infrastructure/backend:

  • The ICXT core application is needs to be installed in order to use PDF Export.
  • The rendering time of a PDF document depends on the size of content. It can take minutes to completely render a PDF document for a large content object.
  • There can only be a limited amount of parallel PDF rendering tasks (default 5). Any other users that may request PDF generation will be added to a queue and will start generating their PDF once the previous requests have been completed and a processing slot is becoming available.
  • PDF Export depends on an open source PDF generation tool for rendering PDFs. The “wkhtmltopdf” tool needs to be installed on the system running the WebSphere server in order to leverage the feature through ICXT.

Limitations for features:

  • The rendered PDF cannot be shared with other Connections users via Connections features such as Activity Stream events, automatic file share to person/community, or any other way (other than sharing the downloaded PDF directly).
  • It is not possible to export all Community information into a single PDF (including Community members, remote application content).
  • Certain content types within Connections are not supported for PDF export, these include:
    • Status Updates (global and Community)
    • Events within the Activity Stream, Personal Stream, Community Recent Updates
    • Bookmarks
    • Community Highlights
    • Metrics
    • Community Rich Content
    • Community Gallery
    • Events
    • Surveys
    • Docs
    • CCM Content
    • Profiles
    • Activity Plus
  • Documents can only be rendered as PDF, no other file format is supported for export.
  • There is limited support for how certain elements can be displayed within the PDF. Some HTML content visible in the browser can not be displayed in a PDF. This includes:
    • Media content that by design can not be represented in a printed format, like videos and iFrames to other web content
    • Protected resources loaded from others platforms than Connections (PDF Export can not log in to or leverage SSO for other applications)
  • Links to the PDF will expire within a predefined timeframe (default 2 hours). Afterwards the content has to be printed again for a new PDF document.
  • Users may not have access to the PDF Export functionality for Connections content depending on their access rights for the content as well as additional settings Community owners or administrators may put in place.
  • PDFs can not be generated in languages other than English. This is unrelated to the Connections content that is being printed but to the additional text added to the PDF to structure it accordingly.

Limitations for design:

  • It’s not possible to adjust the content within the rendered PDF outside of the prepared configuration options and the available templates.
  • The PDF viewer leveraged to display the PDF to the user is not customizable - the feature set is limited to the PDF viewer implementation in the respective browser (and browser version).

Tailored Experiences - Community templating

The following limitations were identified for the templating module:

Limitations for infrastructure/backend:

  • Templates can only be created by the Connections administrator. End users can not manage the templates they have available for PDF Export.