How to check on & filter PDFs password protected for OPENING

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Arthur
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Posts: 114
Joined: Sat Sep 09, 2017 11:58 pm
Location: Yateley, UK

How to check on & filter PDFs password protected for OPENING

Post by Arthur »

Dear All;
I am looking for a solution (within Switch & Pitstop Server, but also anything else that could work within Switch is welcome) to be able to check and filter documents that are Password protected to OPEN the document.
Switch does not return anything (going Stats -> SecurityMethod) on such files, as I understand it is required to open the document in order to read whether there is any security imposed or not, but if a password is required to even open a document, then it cannot do so.
All the other options with Pitstop & subsequently Pitstop Server allow for checking regular Adobe Security regarding modification, printing, editing etc, but no option to detect what I am after.
At least nothing I could find relevant.

Whenever I am getting a document like this it ends up in ProblemJobs, meanwhile I'd prefer a more controlled way of letting it go on a connector that would then allow for a custom message, CheckPoint etc. rather than fail the job completely when it hits any PitStop Server action or anything is to be read from such a document (ie: page count).
Using aforementioned SecurityMethod variable in Switch does not deliver.

Would anyone know of any other way to find out about this kind of security ??
saitok
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Posts: 63
Joined: Fri Apr 24, 2015 10:14 am
Location: Tokyo Japan

Re: How to check on & filter PDFs password protected for OPENING

Post by saitok »

Hi,

How about the way that you use only PitStop Server at first?
You should be able to get XML report from PitStop Server which include a message showing the security problem.
And then, if you can put the XML report and the PDF into Switch, you can pick up the XML report as metadata of the PDF.
You might handle a little more flexibly.

Regards,
Arthur
Member
Posts: 114
Joined: Sat Sep 09, 2017 11:58 pm
Location: Yateley, UK

Re: How to check on & filter PDFs password protected for OPENING

Post by Arthur »

Hi Saitok;
Thx for your proposed solution. It makes some sense as a standalone solution, but not really in our scenario / workflow, where the issue is encountered in the middle of a chain of 10 flows.
As the locked document can be a part of few tens or hundreds of docs which make for the whole job and all of them have to be processed differently depending on their type, which later on have to be merged to create 1 combined pdf (sometimes formed of 300-400 individual documents and comprising of few thousand pages in a predefined order / sequence), hooking up a Pitstop hotfolder in the flow, is not really an option, as in order to get the result I would need to process all PDFs from the job through it (as it is unknown whether a PDF comes locked for opening or not - it is Switch that checks all of those things), which in subsequently means that they would loose all the metadata going through hard folder, which then would again need to be reassigned, but prior to that exported.... to then be able to be reassigned.
And it needs to be done for each and every document going through that hotfolder.

Although it may work, this really is not going to help me, as it sounds like a nightmare.
Already it has become a bit lengthy to process jobs through those flows, where we have got different and very specific solutions for odd eventualities we encounter occasionally, but in order for them to work - we need them applied to each and every job / document going through, to be able to address the issues, as when a document drops - the whole job drops.
The initial condition is that all the job documents have to be successfully processed, otherwise the whole job (comprising of tens or hundreds of files) is incomplete and fails.

This is the world of pharmaceutical and clinical trial printing :)
And we do get some "nice" surprises as locked for opening documents or regular scanned documents converted to PDF which do not conform with PDF construction standards according to Enfocus...
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