Finally got my Cocoon Documentum Transformer fully functional this evening thanks to the good folks at the Cocoon Users Mailing List. My problem was that the Documentum xDQL query was returning a full XML document. When I tried to parse that, the extra startDocument and endDocument calls were causing the runtime exception (archived mailing list thread).

Now that I have my transformer working, I can configure any number of XML docs I want, each with any number of xDQL queries against any docbase my server can see. This is real handy because there are times when you want to run the same query against multiple docbases. I’ve currently got the pipeline configured to style the query results using a generic xDQL-to-HTML stylesheet, but now that I’ve got everything working, the sky is the limit. Here are some ideas…

Documentum admin portal

Go to one page and see very quickly what the status is of key metrics across all Documentum servers, docbases, and environments (Dev, QA, Prod). This is easily done using Cocoon’s aggregation of my styled query results. If I really wanted to get fancy I could use the Cocoon portal framework and create an honest-to-goodness portal with multiple users and profiles (different users might want to monitor different things on different docbases) as well as security.

But, at some point, this thing starts to approach the out-of-the-box Documentum Administrator client and I’m definitely not up for reinventing that wheel. So, this one is a lower priority.

Documentum RSS alerts

Create one or more RSS feeds that will syndicate alerts for things in the environment that need attention. To do this, I’ll add another transformation in my pipeline that will apply business logic to the query results and format “alerts” as XML. I will then add an alert-XML-to-RSS stylesheet. (I’m separating the two because I might want to format alerts in HTML). Once that is in place, I can use a news aggregator like Amphetadesk or NewsMonster to poll my Documentum RSS alerts periodically for things that need attention.

This one is nice because it does not force the admins to go to a web page–they just leave their aggregator running on their desktop.

Return Documentum Query Results in a Spreadsheet

Sometimes you’d like to be able to query multiple docbases and have the results in a spreadsheet so you can then do some analysis or whatever. Today you have to query each docbase and then cut-and-paste the results. With my transformer in place, I ought to be able to spit my query results into an Excel spreadsheet, PDF, SVG, whatever.