Hi Brian,
Sorry, just saw the new posting right now...
We never faced the problem of parallel LibreOffice conversions before, and we don't have a solution for it. In typical ]po[ use scenarios, there is usually a single accountant in charge of generating printable invoices for customers. No other documents require conversion, usually.
My personal coding style for these type of structures would be to generate short BASH scripts from within OpenACS, and to place them in a specific directory. Then use cron or similar (once per second) to poll if one of these scripts is running, and start the next one.
But the solution from Gustaf appears to be much more elegant...
However, I'm not clear about how to return the converted result to the user. This is asynchronous, and may take minutes or even hours in a congested system. This is beyond any HTTP timeout.
I guess that is something you'd have to fix on the application level. Maybe by sending the result to the user via Email? Maybe using manually polling via a "check if ready" page? This problem would apply to both ns_job and BASH scripts...
Cheers
Frank
