Develop Reference

PDF Creating Server

I've been tasked to create (or seek something that is already working) a centralized server with an API that has the ability to return a PDF file passing some data, and the name of the template, it has to be a robust solution, enterprise ready. The goal is as follows:
A series of templates for different company things. (Invoices, Orders, Order Plannings, etc)
A way of returning a PDF from external software (Websites, ERP, etc)
Can be an already ready enterprise solution, but they are pressing for a custom one.
Can be any language, but we don't have any dedicated Java programmers in-house. We are PHP / .NET, some of us dabble, but the learning curve could be a little steep.
So, I've been reading. One way we've thought it may be possible is installing a jasper reports server, and creating the templates in Jaspersoft Studio, then using the API to return the PDF files. A colleague stands for this option, because it's mostly done, but 1º is java and 2º I think it's like using a hammer to crack a nut.
Other option we've been toying with is to use C# with iTextSharp to create a server, and create our own API that returns exactly the PDF with the data we need. Doing this we could have some benefits, like using the database connector we have already made and extracting most of the data from the database, instead of having to pass around a big chunk of data, but as it is bare, it doesn't really have a templating system. We'd have create something from with the XMLWorker or with c# classes but it's not really "easy" as drag and drop. For this case I've been reading about XFA too, but documentation on the iText site is misleading and not clear.
I've been also reading about some other alternatives, like PrinceXML, PDFBox, FOP, etc, but the concept will be the same as iText, we'd have to do it ourselves.
My vote, even if it's more work is to go the route of iText and use HTML / CSS for the templates, but my colleagues claim that the templates should be able to be changed every other week (I doubt it), and be easy. HTML / CSS would be too much work.
So the real question is, how do other business approach this? Did I leave anything out on my search? Is there an easier way to achieve this?
PS: I didn't know if SO would be the correct place for this question, but I'm mostly lost and risking a "too broad question" or "off topic" tag doesn't seem that bad.
EDIT:
Input should be sent with the same request. If we decide the C# route, we can get ~70% of the data from the ERP directly, but anyway, it should accept a post request with some data (template, and data needed for that template, like an invoice data, or the invoice ID if we have access to the ERP).
Output should be a PDF (not interested in other formats, just PDF).
Templates will be updated only by IT. (Mostly us, the development team).
Performance wise, I don't know how much muscle we'll need, but right now, without any increase, we are looking at ~500/1000 PDFs daily, mostly printed from 10 to 10.30 and from 12 to 13h. Then maybe 100 more the rest of the day.
TOP performance should not be more than ~10000 daily when the planets align, and is sales season (twice a year). That should be our ceiling for the years to come.
The templates have some requirements:
Have repeating blocks (invoice lines, for example).
Have images as background, as watermark and as blocks.
Have to be multi language (translatable, with the same data).
Have some blocks that are only show on a condition.
Blocks dependent on the page (PDF header / page header / page footer / PDF footer)
Template will maybe have to do calculations over some of the data, I don't think we'll ever need this, but it's something in the future may be asked by the company.
The PDFs don't need to be stored, as we have a document management system, maybe in the future we could link them.
Extra data: Right now we are using "Fast-Reports v2 VCL"

Your question shows you've been considering the problem in detail before asking for help so I'm sure SO will be friendly.
Certainly one thing you haven't detailed much in your description is the broader functional requirements. You mentioned cracking a nut with a hammer, but I think you are focused mostly on the technology/interfacing. If you consider your broader requirements for the documents you need to create, the variables involved, it's might be a bigger nut that you think.
The approach I would suggest is to prototype solutions, assuming you have some room to do so. From your research, pick maybe the best 3 to try which may well include the custom build you have in mind. Put them through some real use-cases end to end - rough as possible but realistic. One or two key documents you need to output should be used across all solutions. Make sure you are covering the most important or most common requirements in terms of:
Input Format(s) - who can/should be updating templates. What is the ideal requirement and what is the minimum requirement?
Output Requirement(s) - who are you delivering to and what formats are essential/desirable
Data Requirement(s) - what are your sources of data and how hard/easy is it to get data from your sources to the reporting system in the format needed?
Template feature(s) - if you are using templates, what features do the templates need? This includes input format(s) but I was mostly thinking of features of the engine like repeating/conditional content, image insertion, table manipulation etc. ie are your invoices, orders and planning documents plain or complex
API requirements - do you have any broader API requirements. You mentioned you use PHP so a PHP library or Web/Web Service is likely to be a good starting point.
Performance - you haven't mentioned any performance characteristics but certainly if you are working at scale (enterprise) it would be worth even rough-measuring the throughput.
iText and Jasper are certainly enterprise grade engines you can rely on. You may wish to look at Docmosis (please note I work for the company) and probably do some searches for PDF libraries that use templates.
A web service interface is possibly a key feature you might want to look at. A REST API is easy to call from PHP and virtually any technology stack. It means you will likely have options about how you can architect a solution, and it's typically easy to prototype against. If you decide to go down the prototyping path and try Docmosis, start with the cloud service since you can prototype/integrate very quickly.
I hope that helps.

From my years of experience in working with PDF I think you should pay attention to the following points:
The performance: You may do the fastest performance with API based pdf files generation in comparision to HTML or XML to PDF generation (because of an additional layer of conversion involved). Considering peaks in the load you may want to calculate the cost of scaling up the generation by adding more servers (and estimate the cost of additional servers or resources required per additional pdf file per day).
Ease of iterations and changes: how often will you need to adjust templates? If you are going to create templates just once (with some iterations) but then no changes required then you should be OK by just coding them using the API. Otherwise you should strongly consider using HTML or XML for templates to simplify changes and to decrease the complexity of making changes in templates;
Search and indexing: If you may need to run search among created documents then you should consider storing indexes of documents generated or maybe store more the source data in XML along with PDF file generated;
Long time preservation: you should better conform to PDF/A sub-format in case you are looking for a long time digital preservation for your documents. See the VeraPDF open source initiative that you may use to validate generated and incoming PDF documents against the conformance to PDF/A requirements;
Preserving source files The PDF format itself was not designed to be edited (though there are some PDF editors already) so you may consider the need of preserving the source data to be able to regenerate PDF documents later and probably introduce additional output formats later.

NewRelic ignore a single page from monitoring

I have a site hosted on Appharbor (free version), and then have the NewRelic free add-on. I setup the availability monitoring to go against my homepage.
Now, I'm getting a bunch of errors because my REST api page is returning errors. I want NewRelic to completely ignore this page.
How do I have NewRelic ignore this page?

It sounds like you want to investigate DisableBrowserMonitoring() in the New Relic .NET agent API.
If you only want to turn off the RUM feature for some applications (app/website being monitored) you can use the DisableBrowserMonitoring() in the New Relic .NET agent API mentioned above. This disables the automatic insertion of browser monitoring scripts for specific pages. Currently, this is only supported with web applications, but we have experienced success that this can work with static pages. Add this call to any pages you do not wish to instrument with page load timing (sometimes referred to as real user monitoring or RUM). More information, recommendations and an example how to use this here: http://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/net-agent/features/net-agent-api#disable_browser.
Another solution is to use the browserMonitoring element child of the configuration element. browserMonitoring configures page load timing (sometimes referred to as real user monitoring or RUM) in your .NET application. Page load timing gives you insight your end users' performance experience. This is accomplished by measuring the time it takes for your users' browsers to download and render your webpages by injecting a small amount of JavaScript code into the header and footer of each page. More information: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/agents/net-agent/installation-configuration/net-agent-configuration#browsermon-autoInstrument
<browserMonitoring autoInstrument="true">
<attributes enabled=”true”>
<exclude>myApiKey.*</exclude>
<include>myApiKey.foo</include>
</attributes>
</browserMonitoring>
The config file method lets you filter without having to change code. However, you also have to be careful if you use the config option to exclude paths because you're putting a Regular Expression in there, and if it is a complex one (which it shouldn't be) it could affect performance and things like that. On the other hand, if you just use a plain and simple regex to look for a page, it is pretty fast too.
I think that the API calls might perform better but that is totally subjective, and I wanted to give you both options.
Note, after any change in your configuration, you will need to perform an iisreset as administrator and exercise your app for a while to see the changes reflected on your New Relic Dashboard.

Can we use the WF rules engine in a web application?

Trying to understand how to use WF rule engine outside of a WWF application. I've only read a blog post on the topic. But I have certain doubts on the feasibility.
My application requirements are as follows:
Web-based UI for writing the rules, and storing them in db.
A windows service will download the rule. A rule execution engine will gather data it requires and execute the rule, and give a result as output.
The rule is simply a set of instructions which must act on a row of a table. The schema of the table is dynamic; however there is some metadata which tells the rule execution engine how to gather the necessary inputs from that row.
I know that rules are usually input using a rules editor; this is a windows form application. This usually generates a *.rules file. The WF rules engine, as per my knowledge, evaluates this file and does the execution of the rule.
The *.rules file is an xml representation of the rule.
Is there any api in the dotnet framework which generates this xml representation? And, can we build a web-based front end for inputting the rules?

Was wondering if there was an api kind of thingy and I came across the following:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsdesktop/Creating-Rules-Using-the-23c5d561
It is an api like interface. However it consumes objects from the System.CodeDom namespace (usually various kinds of CodeExpression objects).
To go about using it you have to correctly represent the code expression objects in your front-end via some mechanism (by using xml or json). In the server, i.e. when you post the rule to the server, you have to create the necessary code expression correctly (via parsing) and feed those things to the api.
You need two types of code expression objects - one for evaluation of the rule condition, and the other for the stuff to execute when the rule passes or fails. (I only need stuff to execute when rule passes).
The sample provided there gives you an idea of how to use the api. The rest is something you'd have to build on.
A program source code is commonly represented in memory using an AST. All you'd have to design for is making your own implementation.

If you want to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), you must have WF XAML generated - not .rules or XML representation of that (whatever that is). Here is an example of a Workflow XAML file. There are basically three ways to generate this (starting with the least complex method)
By using the designer in Visual Studio
By generating a DynamicActivity-instance runtime and serializing it
By implementing your own generator
To answer your question: Yes - it's option #2. If your rules are very simple (if-then-else) and you don't anticipate them to increase in complexity in the future, option #3 may be a viable alternative as well.

Any tools, libraries or suggestions to simplify dynamic question functionality?

I am working on an ASP.NET project that is relatively simple except for one requirement which requires custom questionnaires be attached to specific types of tasks. These questionnaires need to be customized regularly and no development, within the app itself, should be needed add questionnaires. The questionnaires currently do not require an editing tool and can be done by uploading a template, changing something in a DB, whatever. They can be stored in any format and the resulting output needs to be captured to be edited or viewed later.
The types of questions in the questionnaire could be:
Selections (select one from a list)
Input (text, integers, dates, etc)
Yes/No
The ability to display questions based on answers from other questions. For example if they answer yes to question X, display question Y else display question Z. Need to be able to apply data validation such as required fields, ranges, etc on questions (could all be probably capture by basic regex).
The simplest break down would be:
Create a new event.
Based on the type of event display a specific questionnaire.
Questionnaires can change over time but they can be considered as new version each time and data will always be related to a specific version and not need to be migrated to updated versions.
The questionnaire output (data elements and a final calculated value) must be captured.
XML output (or any other format) of data elements entered.
The optimal (unicorn) scenario would be to have a basic template in XML or something that a user can learn to create easily and it would be stored and versioned in a DB. When a user makes a new event, the app would fetch the appropriate template which would display the questionnaire to the user. The user would fill it out and the output would be posted as some type of output (again XML would be nice but not required). That output would be attached to the event. Done.
Are there any .NET compatible tools/libraries that I could leverage to accomplish this? InfoPath seems like a tool that might be of use but I have almost zero experience with it so I am not sure about its constraints / implementation and if it is just overkill. The solution needs to be contained within the ASP.NET application. An external editor tool for creating templates would be ok but the templates must be viewable and editable on the web with no constraints to the user.
Can anyone provide examples of this being done or hints on how you might have tackled this?
Since the application is relatively easy to create other than this one feature, I would rather not spend 80% of my time trying to implement the custom questionnaire functionality and spend more time on the problem the application is trying to solve.
Tech available: ASP.NET, Silverlight, SQL Server

I would suggest having a look at a dot net nuke implementation, I am sure there should be a lot of viable options (if not all free).
DotNetNuke
Have a look at the Forge to see free plugins

Consider evaluating SurveyMaster at CodePlex. It's licensed under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), and you can modify its source for your needs.

Creating an international website

The question might sound weird, but I am planning to create a asp.net website, which when fully done, will ideally cater to all countries.
I am currently in the architecture phase.. and is there anything that I should keep in might when doing this?
like
saving all datetime fields in utc
using user's timezone to display all time related data
all labels in the website to be localizable
is there anything else??
thanks,
Chris

A few additional points:
Some languages read from Right to
Left (Hebrew for example), which
will affect your UI.
Make sure your datastore supports
unicode (NVARHCAR vs VARCHAR).
Provide an easy way for translators
to contribute content. Usually means
creating a Data Driven Resource
Provider.
Internationalization and Localization is a good place to start.

You should think about how the localization process will take place. I assume you are not a native speaker in all languages you want to use for your application.
There are several approachs on how to address this: For example, there are companies that specialize in localization, meaning you give them an excel sheet, or an xml file.
You should also think about, where do you want to have all these localizations. Do you only want them in your ASP.net application, meaning in only one place? Then the resource file will be your way to go, because they are easy to handle and easy to send to localization studios.
But if you want to use the localizations in more than one place, you need to store them in a web service or in a database. Keep in mind that using localizations across multiple plattforms (e.g. web site, administrative tools) will force you to write import/export functionality for the used tables. (Because you won't give the localization company access to your database)

I would start by looking here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c6zyy3s9.aspx.
I also guess you are working on doing a SQL database. If that is the case look at things like using nvarchars.