What is a Connector?

A connector is a way to go from a Kodexa Document instance and get the original source for the content.

For example, if you have a PDF document, you can use the local filesystem connector to allow you to get the original PDF file. This is useful if you want to do something like OCR the document, or if you want to do something like extract the text from the PDF.

Working with the source can be done any any point of processing in a Kodexa document, for example you might want a step in the pipeline to parse a PDF, and a later step to get the original PDF file to look for table using computer vision.

graph LR
    A[Parse PDF] -->B(Parse PDF)
    B --> C(Layout Analysis)
    C --> D(Table Identification)

How is Connector implemented?

A connector implement a single static method, get_source which takes a document and returns the bytes of the original content.

Lets take a look at a very simple source:

from kodexa import Document

class LocalFilesystemConnector:

    @staticmethod
    def get_source(document: Document) -> bytes:
        return open(document.source, 'rb').read()