Inconsistent Empty PDF when converting Word or Excel to PDF

We use the Aspose Cloud service for Words and Cells to convert either of these to PDF. Unsure if this is the correct category to post to, doesn’t seem to separate on-premises from cloud services.

On roughly 12% of requests we receive an empty PDF as a response instead of the converted document. We’ve noticed that in our tracing, the Dotnet Core SDK is receiving a 401 response, then requesting a new token and then sending the convert request again and this is when the empty result is returned. No indication of failure is included, it’s essentially a successful request but the PDF is empty.

From our telemetry we have seen that this only occurs when the 401+Token request takes place, when this is not done, then requests convert correctly.

The same document with succeed when attempting to convert at a later point, so the issue is not related to document contents.

Anyone seen a similar issue?

@Marc_Walter

I am afraid we have not noticed such an issue yet. Please share your sample code(project) along with the input files. We will test the scenario and will share our findings with you. Secondly, please note Aspose Cloud SDKs auto refresh the access token. However, if you are using some other REST client to consume Aspose Cloud APIs then you need to take care of token expiry yourself.

@tilal.ahmad, thanks for the feedback.

We can’t replicate this in controlled conditions. We run a suite of automated tests and we expanded those to 100 to try and replicate but we haven’t been able to do so.

All we know is that ‘in the wild’ during regular use of the service, we see a ~12% empty response rate from the service. We think it may be related to file size, but it is not related to contents, because when we re-run these empty responses with the same source document manually, we receive a correctly converted file.

We’re updating our service to include a retry policy if we receive these empty documents, with the hope that a re-run will result in a correct conversion, this goes live tomorrow night and I can report on how effective that has been.

@Marc_Walter

Thanks for your detailed answer. Sure, you can update your code but we will appreciate it if you please share your sample code along with the workflow. It will help us to investigate the issue and help you.

Furthermore, if you are using Aspose Cloud SDKs, then please make sure that you are using the latest versions of the SDKs.