iText has announced the availability of iText DITO 2.0, the next generation of its template engine that converts data into PDFs. This release adds the iText DITO Manager for a workspace control room experience and a central repository for all templates, data collections and resources.

DITO Manager enables users to efficiently manage the full lifecycle of templates and all their dependencies, including data collections, images, stylesheets and fonts. With the inclusion of promotion paths, versioning and user management, there is no limit to the number of templates that can be effectively managed.

The iText DITO Editor has been optimised to integrate with the Manager experience and it benefits from a UI make-over, as well as the addition of several new features. Likewise, the PDF generation REST API has also been optimised to integrate with iText DITO Manager.

Due to the tight integration between the Editor, SDK and new iText DITO Manager in this release of iText DITO 2.0, the native Java flavour of the SDK is deprecated to instead focus on further development of the Dockerised REST version.

iText DITO Manager introduces the concept of a workspace in which templates, data collections and additional resources are stored and deployed. The workspace manages users and security roles, connected SDK instances and users’ template promotion pipeline.

In the data management area of iText DITO Manager users can create and maintain reusable data collections. These are data structures, extracted from JSON files which can be uploaded and associated with one or more templates. To preview the templates with relevant data at design time, data samples can be added to data collections. Versioning, permission management and dependency control are available on all data collections users create.  

In iText DITO 2.0 there are four different types of templates: the self-explanatory standard, header and footer templates, and compositions, which are combinations of the other three types of templates. Compositions allow for the reuse of headers, footers or body sections across a variety of different output documents.

Just like data collections, templates have a full audit trail, permission settings and a dependency list. They can be promoted from dev to production along the different stages of users’ workspace promotion path. As this occurs, they are automatically deployed to the connected SDK instances.

Templates often contain more than just content. Layout resources like images, stylesheets and fonts are also managed in iText DITO 2.0, meaning they can be reused across multiple templates. From a content management perspective this allows users to update the look and feel of multiple templates at once, by updating the images and styles they share.

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