MO:DCA / AFP

MS Technology offers powerful support for IBM’s MO:DCA format family. MS Technology has been the sole provider of MODCA support to IBM to use with their ECM solutions including IBM Content Manager 8 (CM8), Content Manager OnDemand (CMOD), Content Navigator, and WEBi. This format is most commonly used by government agencies, banking, finance and insurance companies to archive standard forms and other records.

What is MODCA?

MODCA (Mixed Object Document Content Architecture), or MO:DCA, is an IBM compound document format for text and graphics elements in a document. The ‘Mixed Object’ refers to the fact that an MODCA file can contain multiple types of objects, including text, images, vector graphics, and barcodes.

MODCA supports Revisable Documents, which are editable like revisable-form text, Presentation Documents, which provide specific output formatting similar to final-form text, and Resource Documents, which hold control information such as fonts. An MODCA file consists of a sequential, ordered hierarchy of independent objects – documents, pages, data objects, and resource objects such as fonts and ICC profiles. Each object is delimited by begin/end structures, and objects to be rendered specify presentation parameters and resource requirements in structures called “environment groups”. Since the pages in MODCA documents appear in sequential order, presentation can start as soon as the first page is received.

Formats for specific objects are specified in various OCAs (Object Content Architectures): PTOCA for presentation text that has been formatted for output, GOCA for vector graphics objects, IOCA for bitmapped Images, FOCA for fonts, and BCOCA for barcodes. MODCA is implemented as IBM’s Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) page description language.