Moving from SBL to C# or VB.Net
This article follows on from a piece I wrote previously about the release of Kofax Capture v11, and how SBL was going to be removed from v11.1.
As of v11.1 all SBL scripts will need to have been removed and/or re-written in C# or VB.Net – SBL will no longer be supported.
Any Kofax Capture users needing to stay in support, or following a corporate policy of being on ‘latest version’ or ‘latest minus one’ will need to upgrade to Kofax Capture v11 at some point in the relatively near future, and that upgrade path will lead them to v11.1 as the next step.
I wrote another article a while back about Spring Cleaning your capture system – giving it a thorough review to see how it could be improved. Whilst this sort of review would ideally be a regular process, it often isn’t. The need to redevelop any SBL scripts adds an extra reason to make a start on this now!
Rather than seeing the removal of SBL as a cost and inconvenience, see it as a reason to start a review and see how your system could be improved.
Any existing scripts should be checked to see if they are still needed and, as they are going to be redeveloped anyway, this is a great opportunity to see if they can be improved or have additional functionality added. Small well written scripts can have a hugely beneficial impact on the efficiency and accuracy of your system – see another article on Small Changes.
So how to go about moving from SBL to C# or VB.Net?
Do we have SBL scripts, and where are they used?
You may not even know whether you have any existing scripts as they often just perform background processes not visible to the users.
Sadly Kofax Administration doesn’t give us a nice easy way of checking where scripts are assigned. We can see some scripts through Administration, but not where they are used, and whether they are actually assigned to any published batch classes.
If you need to locate any SBL scripts used in your batch classes you can download our free Kofax Capture Script Locator utility, and follow the steps below.
1. Export a single batch class, to create a .cab export file.
2. View the contents of the export.
3. Copy the Admin.xml file out of the .cab file.
4. Run the Kofax Capture Script Locator utility.
5. Click Select an Admin.xml file and browse to the relevant xml file.
6. Click Find SBL Scripts, Find C# Scripts, or Find VB.Net Scripts to generate a list of relevant scripts used in this batch class. In the example below we can see that there are 2 SBL scripts - 1 Document Class script for the Finance Documents class, and 1 Recognition Script associated with the Name_ICR_To_UpperCase profile.
Now we know where the scripts are used, we can go back to Kofax Administration to see what is in the scripts.
So we know we are using SBL scripts, and where they are, but how do we go about converting them?
There is no conversion wizard available. So in almost all cases you will simply need to rewrite the scripts in C# or VB.Net.
You’ll need to make sure that you have the correct development environment – you can check what versions you can use in this Kofax knowledgebase article.
Once you have the environment in place… it’s time to start reviewing, improving, and rewriting those SBL scripts.
Check out our Scripting Guides as a starting point, and feel free to Contact Us for help if you don’t have the necessary development skills.
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