Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier - Part 2

Alberta’s Capital Health was a big user of Expedition from the 1990s through to 2010. They had hundreds of projects that were sitting on a Sybase SQL-Anywhere server that needed to be retired, but they needed to have easy access to the documents related to these health care projects.

Emerald solved their problem using the PCM-Archiver. This PCM add-on tool automates the extraction process of all projects and documents, and in this case, ultimately saved the client approximately 140 hours of computing work. For a more in-depth understanding of this project and its results, please refer to Part 1 of Saying Goodbye to Expedition 8.5 and Hello to Unifier. In Part 2, we are going to explore a more technical perspective including some of the bumps we experienced along the way of extracting 1,213,318 documents, generating 1,123,318 Excel files, generating links for 39,384 attachments, and generating 91,236 PDF files!

Single-User interface

When archiving the projects, we ran into a few tricky issues, as you would expect with years of data from hundreds of users.

PCM is mostly known today as a web application - when you print a report in version 13, an InfoMaker process is started to generated the PDF with the report contents. In version 14, a BI-Publisher call is made to generate the report. The PCM-Archiver can connect to both the InfoMaker process or BI-Publisher, and it all works because these applications were built with automation in mind. There are no interactive dialogs displayed where the user needs to get involved; everything is automated.

However, Expedition 8.5 was not a web application, and of course that means older technology.

Now, back then, web applications were not as popular as they are now. Expedition 8.5 and older expects a user to be working with it at all times. So, when you print, a dialog is displayed with printing options. If you want to print to a PDF, there will be another dialog to enter the PDF filename, and then the user needs to enter the destination filename and press the OK button to actually save the file.

That is perfectly fine if you want to print one document, or 5, or 10... But we needed to generate the PDFs for over a million documents and clicking around wasn't an option.

Automation to the rescue

With all our automation tools, we were already very familiar with AutoHotKey and have dynamically generated scripts that recognize the Expedition printing dialog and automate the clicking. After that, there would be another dialog for the PDF printer, and, again, the script would recognize that dialog, enter the PDF file name, and emulate the user clicking the print button. A few timeouts were added here and there to ensure no resources were left hanging, and it worked like a charm.

Other than that, we had some minor issues that we were able to work around. The tree structure in Expedition 8.5 is archived in a different format than PCM 13 & PCM 14, so we had to do some wizardry to understand how the printing process worked in Expedition 8.5. We also had to automate the report generation, since we were comparing literally thousands of documents and dozens of document types, and the only way to properly compare all that was with automation and with proper summaries.

Final Results - Go Computer Go

In the end, we were able to overcome all challenges, and the process worked very well.

After we had done some testing and worked out all the technical hurdles, we then had fun watching the PCM-Archiver do its thing. Of course, we did not watch it exactly because that would have been like watching paint dry. It took 6 days of a very busy VM (140 straight hours), extracted 1,213,318 documents, generated 91,236 PDFs, 39,384 attachments and 389 ZIP files. 6 days later, all files were generated, and AHS was able to move forward and retire Expedition after 20 years of great service.