I was trying to get to the bottom of this one. I had a look on the web but its fairly hopeless – leading me to believe that its not been understood. This is my understanding.
If you have a PDF file in Documentum and its large – then no matter what Documentum will fetch it out, so it will stream the whole file between your client request and the server. It will then be opened by the local application – bascially like an open. So byte streaming as such is pretty hopeless. The new 5.3 WebTop clients allow you to access with a UCF or HTTP format – which I think means you can stream the copied files. If you deliver this file to a web server – rather than the local client machine – then that might just work. You have a fast copy to a webserver and then you can stream from there.
PDF files have to be optimized to ensure that the acrobat application asks the web server for the file in chunks. As far as I can see IIS, Tomcat and Apache all byte stream quit effectively – so if you use acrobat to get the file from the web – it should page – byte serve without doing much else. Essentially its down to Acrobat to ask the for the file in bits. If you have optimized the file – then that should work ok – the server – the web server doesn’t know how many bytes of a file to serve – its Acrobat that know the format and know how much to ask for to be able to display pages sequentially.
If you want to write some kind of application that does that – I’d say you would be in a world of specific formats and with PDF – dont bother – let Acrobat do it.
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