Sitecore PXM and ODG project (part 1 - introduction)

1. Introduction
2. Non-editable fields
3. Architecture
4. Customising ODG email
5. PXM InDesign custom task

This series of posts will cover my discoveries while using Print Exprience Manager (PXM) and Online Document Generator (ODG) with Sitecore 8.1 initial release. It won't go into any detail on the setup of PXM or ODG as there are great resources and videos for getting these set up.  Unfortunately because it is an internal client project I can't post screenshots, but by the time the project went live it allowed the business to import InDesign documents (created by marketing) into Sitecore, which then displayed these to the end user for selection. Once a document was seelcted the user could then edit specified text and imagery in the document, save their document, export it as a PDF, and allow it to be sent to print. Although similar in functionality to out-of-the-box ODG, it was decided that the user should not be allowed access to the Sitecore admin interface to use ODG. We did, however, use as much existing functionality in PXM and ODG as possible; it was effectively a content-delivery based re-skin/wrapper of ODG.
While the majority of the documentation around PXM focuses on how to import Sitecore content into an InDesign document and format it, our project was the reverse: given a number of already-created InDesign documents, we were to import these into Sitecore (PXM) and allow them to be editable in ODG for export as high quality PDF to be used by the printing companies. Unfortunately our marketing team had little interest in learning Sitecore, and little time to explain the workings of InDesign. Coming from a Sitecore background (with minimal Photoshop knowledge and no InDesign knowledge) this meant that I certainly tought myself a lot in a very short time.

InDesign

Edit: just after I wrote this an excellent article on how to use the Sitecore connector with InDesign was posted
InDesign itself is based primarily on XML and Sitecore takes advantage of this using the connector (an InDesign plugin) to easily create or import the InDesign elements into Sitecore as items in various sections of the in the content tree. I'd highly recommend watching the series of PXM videos linked above (or at least the first few) to get an idea of how it all works together.   The elements in the InDesign document (shapes, images, text, etc.) are imported into PXM (sub-items in Print Studio projects); whereas the layers, character styles, paragraph styles, and object styles, are saved in the master document (in the media library) which is then referenced by the InDesign project(s). Images are not automatically imported into Sitecore; rather, a reference to the image location on your hard drive is saved in a field (meaning unless others have the image in the same location on the same drive letter, it will not appear for them). If you later choose to import the image into Sitecore, a second field (media reference) overrides this hard drive location reference.
Similar to those familiar with CSS, InDesign has what I'll call "inline" styles (like style="" in HTML), and then defined character and paragraph styles (saved groups of styles given a name, like a CSS class). If you simply select a bunch of text, and hit "bold" it will save it inline, or you can save your styles as a character/paragraph style and apply that to your text (some styles, like centering text, can only be applied to a paragraph). Unfortunately I found out the hard way that the Sitecore connector does not recognise these "inline" styles, but rather relies on character/paragraph styles having been created, which when imported are saved in the master document. I say unfortunate, because none of the InDesign documents we were provided had any character or paragraph styles applied. If you're importing an InDesign document you'll certainly want to ensure these exist first or your document is going to look very strange when you load it from Sitecore. We also discovered that you shouldn't use an ampersand (&) in the style name, as this is misinterpreted by InDesign (as least for TextFrames) and your TextFrame will not be positioned (or even appear) correctly.

Sitecore PXM and ODG

Master documents (where styles are stored)

PXM Projects (where shapes are stored)

ODG items (where user documents are stored)

Installing ODG adds a couple of new icons to the dashboard (in this case the useful one is Document Publisher) and a new ODG section to the content tree.  The SPEAK applications are simply a pretty frontend for manipulating the items in the content tree, which can be done manually by more advanced users.  This new content tree section allows the creation of Collections, which were used to categorise our documents and are stored in the Design Collections bucket; Projects which are a clone of the original PXM project specific to the user who creates it and for some reason aren't stored in a bucket (the fact that they are a clone is useful as it means updates to the original PXM project are automatically applied to all ODG documents cloned from it, but also can be problematic if your user wants to keep a version of the original); Design Templates which specify which formats the PXM projects can be exported as; and Design Documents which link them all together and say "the user has created a document referencing this project (clone) belonging to this collection which can be exported as PDF/other". The Document Publisher app allows the creation of Collections to group documents, as well as creating a user-specific version of a PXM project, edit the text and image fields (field types configurable in the config) in this document, and export it to specified format (through the processing job field which links to the PXM Publishing Settings) PDF high / low quality and Flash out of the box.  These correspond with InDesign Server settings which can be found in <install_directory>\Adobe InDesign CC Server 2014\Resources\Adobe PDF\settings\mul\*.joboptions

Part 2 will cover our first customisation for ODG: specifying which fields should be editable.