Apache Tika

[Mike London]

I have a running Spring REST service that uses the Tika libraries.

Currently, these Tika libraries are 2.9.1.

At some point while adding other features (perhaps this is the issue), the DOCX portion of the Tika extract stopped working. The same basic code in a standalone (not REST) Maven project works OK. so I'm a bit baffled.

Having spent about 8 hours on this, I thought I'd ask the community if anyone had run across this issue with DOCX files in Tika.

The error generated in the SpringBoot REST service is: "TIKA-198: Illegal IOException from org.apache.tika.parser.microsoft.ooxml.OOXMLParser"

Below is the test code that works in the standalone Spring project and is the same code spread across Spring's Controller and Service methods but doesn't work.

        String textToReturn = "";
        try
        {
            byte[] fileContent = Files.readAllBytes(Paths.get(".../TestDOCX.docx"));  // full path not shown here

            InputStream inputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(fileContent);

            Parser parser = new AutoDetectParser();
            BodyContentHandler handler = new BodyContentHandler(-1); // handle larger files.
            Metadata metadata = new Metadata();
            ParseContext context = new ParseContext();

            //parsing the file
            parser.parse(inputStream, handler, metadata, context);
            textToReturn = handler.toString();
        }
        catch (IOException e)
        {
            System.out.println("IO Exception in TextExtractionService: " + e.getMessage());
        }
        catch (TikaException e)
        {
            System.out.println("Tika Exception in TextExtractionService: " + e.getMessage());
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            System.out.println("General Exception in TextExtractionService: " + e.getMessage());
        }
        System.out.println("\n" + textToReturn);
    }
}

In the REST project where the error occurs, the data are "POSTed" -- not referenced with a disk path, but XLSX, PDF, TXT all work fine. It's just DOCX that is failing.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

- mike

[Tim Holloway]

        catch (Exception e)
        {
            logger.error("Error in TextExtraction Service", e);
        }

You really shouldn't write straight to System.out in a webapp. Even if it's in Spring Boot. Use a real logger. Like Spring itself does.

You also don't need to trap all those Exceptions individually, since they're all Exceptions anyway.

The log example I gave should (depending on the logger you use) print out the error message and the stack trace. The stack trace may have a useful "Caused By" in it.

[Mike London]

That was just an example program to see if the libraries would work.

I wasn't worried about the System.out.println.

But they do work since it's basically a console Spring (TEST) application.

The real SpringBoot uses Log4j, of course.

I don't need help with logging, and that was not my question.

I also posted the actual error received by the more detailed logging.

Thanks Tim.

[Tim Holloway]

Mike London wrote:
I also posted the actual error received by the more detailed logging.

Stack Trace???

Just for info, mixing raw stdio can get confusing, since not everything may print in order.