Introduction to IBM Datacap

Recently I had an opportunity to work on the IBM Datacap. Datacap is a good document capturing tool and is acquired by IBM in 2010. I have used the Datacap Taskmaster Capture product and the version is 8.0. Recently IBM released the version 8.1 of Datacap Taskmaster Capture.

Previously I have worked on the IBM FileNet Capture so it is very natural that I will start comparing the Datacap features with FileNet Capture when I start working on this product. In the first look Datacap seems to be more complex than the FileNet capture and it requires a steep learning curve. I can say that the Datacap is a framework rather than a tool as it is flexible enough to extend the functionality.
At a very high level, the advantages of Datacap over FileNet capture are

• Datacap having the web client so it is a true distribution capture tool
• Datacap having inbuilt data recognition capabilities where in FileNet capture we need to use ADR for recognition
• Datacap is flexible enough to integrate with repositories other than FileNet 

From architecture point of view Datacap is very flexible. It offers a vast set of predefined methods in the actions library and most of the scenarios these predefined methods are enough to fulfill the project requirements. These actions library items called as rules are grouped to form the rule sets and these rule sets are grouped together to form the task. All these tasks are grouped together to complete the job. So developer having the fine control over every action as the tasks are developed using the rules and these rules are set by the developer. Remember that the rules are executed in the order so it is important to set the order of the rules.

The troubleshooting also simple as it provide the logs for each task but I fell that the detailed exception logs are missing. The log data, images and other application data will be saved to configured physical drive. The Datacap Studio tool provides the option to debug the rule sets and debugging process also very simple.


IBM Datacap comes along with MS Access database and developer having the option to configure with Oracle or SQL Server. The installation process is very simple and doesn't take much time. IBM Datacap comes with sample projects and developers can use these projects as a reference.

Updating the mime type property of the doucments in Filenet

When we need to update the properties of the large number of documents  in Content Engine, Filenet provides the script execution option for bulk updates. The scripts are executed using Filenet Enterprise Manager. This option is provided in the search functionality so that we can search the documents based on conditions and update only those articles. This makes developer or support engineer job is easy. Custom property updates generally doesn't require the checkout and checkin of the documents. We can directly update the properties using the script. We can use the below code to update the property.

CEObject.Properties("DocumentType").Value="Confidential"

CEObject.Save

When I tried the above code to update the mime type property it is not working and I found out that it is a read only property and to update the read only properties like mime type we need to checkout the document and before checkin the document we need to update the property. So I have updated the above scrip as mentioned below.

CEObject.Checkout

CEObject.Reservation.Properties("mimetype").Value= "text/html"

CEObject.Reservation.Save

CEObject.Reservation.Checkin

After executing the above script I have observed that the mime type property updated as expected and document version also upgraded but the content of the document is missing. While checkin the document we need to pass the content otherwise it will save the empty document. So I have written a script to get the document content and saved to the local folder and while check-in the document i have added the content. 

CEObject.CopyContent "file:///localfoldername/filename"  
CEObject.Checkout      
CEobject.Reservation.Properties("MimeType")= "text/html"   
CEObject.Reservation.Checkin "foldername\filename"

The above code is used to checkout the content and saved to the local folder and update the mime type property and checkin the content from local folder.