Detailed description of issue
We are preparing to setup a real-time collaboration for annotations. However I am a bit confused because I don’t see how or where you would set a users id into an annotation. I only see annotationUser as a setting on WebViewer but this is how you set the authors name. In your example Real-time PDF collaboration I see a reference to an author id being used in the server annotation.authorId = data.val().authorId; but this isn’t the same thing as setting an authorId right when the webviewer loads.
Code snippet
Your example shows this:
async function onAnnotationCreated(data) {
// Import the annotation based on xfdf command
const [annotation] = await annotationManager.importAnnotCommand(data.val().xfdf);
// Set a custom field authorId to be used in client-side permission check
annotation.authorId = data.val().authorId;
annotationManager.redrawAnnotation(annotation);
}
Guess I am confused because why can’t I simply set an author id directly on the webviewer like this?
Also I noticed the real-time example doesn’t discuss how to differentiate imported annotations. Example would be me and another person had a discussion which was stored in the database. I return a week later to import these annotations, I then don’t have any way of knowing which ones are mine other than the author name, which we would not want to use since someone could change their name in the future.
You can set the current user by calling setCurrentUser. You can provide any string here so you could use their username, user id, etc. If you use the user Id, you can use setAnnotationDisplayAuthorMap to make sure their username appears in the viewer when creating annotations.
Yes, so if I open a document and import 20 saved annotation from 3 different authors, how do I determine which annotations are mine so that I may still edit them? When annotations are stored they only keep the author name in the xml, so when they are returned it is the only reference we have to use.
Here’s an example of a returned annotation with my own title
So when these are returned and I need to determine which annotations are mine, I can only reference the titles title="Andy Herman" which is fine for a simple setup, but if I ever changed my own name to Andy Begman, then I wouldn’t be able to mark these annotation as mine to be able to edit them later.
If everything is set up correctly, the exported annotation title should be the user ID and not the username. You can test using this code:
// Here you should set the user ID, not the user name
instance.Core.annotationManager.setCurrentUser('abcde');
// This function maps a user id to a user name for display purposes
instance.Core.annotationManager.setAnnotationDisplayAuthorMap((id) => {
if(id === 'abcde') {
return "Logan"
}
})
instance.Core.annotationManager.addEventListener('annotationChanged', async (annots, action) => {
// Every time an annotation is added, export it and console log it for debugging purposes
if(action === 'add') {
const xfdf = await instance.Core.annotationManager.exportAnnotations({ annotList: annots })
console.log(xfdf)
}
})
You’ll see that the “title” property is now the user ID (in our case “abcde”) and not the user name
Sorry for the delay here, most the team was on vacation for the holidays.
We cannot add additional attributes to XFDF items because that is against the PDF specification.
I’m talking with the team today to see how they recommend approaching this. The idea with setAnnotationDisplayAuthorMap is that you use it to look up the username based on the ID passed. A very basic example would be something like this:
