Configure the client components

A client is system where you have installed Adobe FrameMaker and Adobe FrameMaker Publishing Client Component. The client has to establish a connection with the server to be able to receive information about what needs to be published and send a response back.

The typical process of configuring and launching the client component involves the following steps:

Stop the client component
Configure the server.ini file
Configure the FrameMaker instance
Launch the client using the StartWorker.bat file

The following sections will guide you through the above-mentioned steps.

Stop the client component

Before you start making configuration changes in the client component, ensure that the client component is not running. If the client component is running on your system, you will see one or more command prompt windows with “FrameServerEx” title as shown below:

To stop the client component, simply close all command prompt windows with “FrameServerEx” title by clicking on the “X” icon.

Configure the server.ini file

The server.ini file contains the parameters to connect to the server component of FMPS. Open the server.ini file in a text editor and configure the following parameters:

port: Specify the port on which the server component is listening for incoming requests.
server: Specify the fully-qualified domain name or the IP address of the server.
scheme: Specify the protocol (http or https) used by the server.
MaxFMSessions: Specify the maximum number of concurrent FrameMaker sessions that the can run on a client machine. By default it is set to 4. This setting works in conjunction with the VAR variable setting in the StartWorker.bat file. For more details, see Launch the client using the StartWorker.bat file.
doNotDeleteGeneratedFile: Supported values - On and Off. By default, it is set to On, which indicates that the publishing process will not delete any existing file on the given location where the output is saved.
HTTPTimeout: Specify the time in seconds after which the connection with the server machine is timed out. This happens when no response is received from the server machine during the configured time.
Delay: Specify the time in seconds that the client machine waits for before launching another instance of FrameMaker.

Configure the FrameMaker instance

To optimize the performance of FrameMaker in automated publishing tasks, make the following changes to FrameMaker configuration. These changes are essential to run scheduled tasks on FMPS and modify the behavior in the following ways.

FMPS ignores unresolved cross-references, unresolved text insets, and missing graphics.

To use MathML, accept the EULA in FrameMaker.
Check all source documents for errors before initiating a build task.
FMPS does not report missing fonts. Ensure that the machine that hosts FMPS client component has all the required fonts.

Launch the client using the StartWorker.bat file

The StartWorker.bat file is used to launch FrameMaker instances (or workers) on the client machine that listen to the publishing requests from the server component. Each worker opens and works with a single FrameMaker instance to complete a publishing task. Once the task is complete, the FrameMaker instance is closed by the worker. The MaxFMSessions parameter in the server.ini file controls how many maximum instances of FrameMaker can run parallelly. The settings in StartWorker.bat file defines how many instances of FrameMaker will run on a given client machine. For example, say you have set the MaxFMSessions parameter to 4 and in the StartWorker.bat file you have defined 8 workers to run. In this case, the client machine can only run 4 instances of FrameMaker at any given time, even though it has launched 8 workers. If the server sends 5 publishing commands to this client system, then 4 publishing tasks will start immediately, and the 5th task will be pushed to a queue. The moment any task gets complete, then the next available worker will take up the 5th task from the queue and start executing it.

Important: To launch the client, provide a valid user email and password. User authentication is done at the server. All users eligible to log in to the server are allowed to launch a client.

The contents of StartWorker.bat file are:

%~d0
 cd %~dp0
SET /a VAR=0 
:HOME 
SET /a VAR=VAR+1

IF %VAR%==3 goto :End

start cmd /K FrameServerEx.exe -username %1 -password %2

goto :HOME 
 
:END

Provide your email and password in quotes. For example, StartWorker.bat "abc@xyz.com" "abc ! 123"

The typeOfAuth used for client authentication is same as that used in the server configuration.

In this file, the line -

IF
%VAR%==2 goto :End

controls how many worker instances will be launched on the client machine. Let's say, you want to launch 4 worker instances, then you must configure it as:

IF %VAR%==5 goto :End

Note that the value of VAR is always 1+ (or one more) than the number of workers you want to launch on the client machine.

After configuring the maximum number of FrameMaker instances that can run simultaneously and the number of workers, you are ready to launch the client component. To launch the client component, you need to run the StartWorker.bat file available at the following location:

\Program Files\Adobe\AdobeFrameMakerPublishingServer 2022\FrameServerExe\StartWorker.bat