The document viewers that alchemy uses can be very useful when viewing a wide variety of documents and images. These viewers can be accessed through the API, and used in custom applications as well as in Captaris Workflow. This document will detail how to programmatically access these viewers.

There are two Alchemy Viewers; A web based viewer called ‘FirstViewer’, and a Windows based client.

The window based client can be accessed in the following manner:

1)    Reference the Alchemy.dll

2)    Instantiate the Alchemy Application object and DefaultViewer through the following code:

            Alchemy.Application oApp = new Alchemy.Application();

            oApp.LoadOptionsFile("");

            oDefaultViewer = oApp.DefaultViewer;           

            oApp = null;

3)    Assign the Viewer status and Owner:

 oDefaultViewer.SetCmdStatus(Alchemy.AuVwrCmdEnum.auVwrUpOneLevel, Alchemy.AuCmdStatusEnum.auCmdNotAvailable);

 oDefaultViewer.SetOwner(ViewerPanel.Handle.ToInt32(), false);

This code sets the Owner by getting the user Handle from the Viewer Panel.

4)    Give the Viewer a document to View:

oDefaultViewer.ViewItem(oDefaultViewer.Application.Databases.Add(strDatabaseName).GetItemByID(intAlchemyItemID));

This code passes the item to veiw, by getting the object Item ID from one of the Alchemy Databases. 

Finally, the user can set the Viewers properties to talor the desired behavior. This includes Height, Width, ReadOnly, FullScreen as well as serveral others.

The simplest way to use the FirstViewer is to reference it from the existing AlchemyWeb:

1)    The FirstViewer is stored under the AlchemyWeb of the Alchemy Server, under the http://[servername]/AlchemyWeb/ViewItemPage.aspx

2)    To use it, you must pass the viewer the Database Name (db=DatabaeName), and the Item Number (item=99). For Example:

http://localhost/AlchemyWeb/ViewItemPage?db=DatabaseName&item=99