If you wish to enable PDF report generation for any of the models hosted on your server then you will need to set up OpenOffice in a headless configuration on the server. This will be used by eSTEM to convert Excel files to PDF.
You can download OpenOffice for free from www.openoffice.org and you will also find documentation on configuring OpenOffice there. The STEM web service has been tested with versions 3.4 and 4.0 of OpenOffice, but it should work with foreseeable newer versions. We would recommend that you try to use the latest version, and only revert to older versions if you encounter problems.
The headless running mode of OpenOffice makes the application run without any visible user interface, but allows communication with other local processes (such as the STEM web service). See OpenOffice’s documentation for more details on this. On Implied Logic’s hosted eSTEM servers we run OpenOffice as a scheduled task on startup with the following command line:
When OpenOffice is installed, it will create a temporary folder containing, among other things, a file named openofficeorg1.cab. This is an archive file that Windows should be able to open. Inside this archive, find the following files and copy them to your web server’s bin folder so that the web service can use them to interact with OpenOffice:
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cli_basetypes.dll
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cli_oootypes.dll
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cli_ure.dll
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cli_uretypes.dll