The Solution
What we needed was a way to get the source from the vendor, take this information and compare against what we have, and, if need be, generate the PDF automatically (Figure 2). This would eliminate the need for a full-time employee to spend valuable work-hours constantly updating this document as well as improving the product quality.
There were a few requirements that had to be addressed:
- The solution had to perform under load. The source document would be requested several thousand times a day under various server load conditions.
- Because of write-permission issues, the PDF generation process could not create a file first, then read from that file. Consequently, it had to be able to be built in memory.
- Since this would be a part of our mission-critical application, it had to be maintainable and easy to deploy.
- As an ad-hoc project, it had to be done quickly and cheaply.
- It had to be easy to develop and add-to in the future.