HOWTO: Compress a Sample Project Enough to Attach to an Atalasoft Support Case

Table of Contents

Background

Atalasoft's support portal has a very strict (overly so to be honest) limit on attachment size in support cases: 5MiB

When providing repro solutions / code, it's often very difficult to fit small enough to attach to a case.

This article provides some strategies that can help

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Important Concepts

Minimizing Guessing

Some of the things we're going to cover here seem like they're a bit more - a competent developer (and our support team are all experienced software developers) can usually work out the missing pieces.

However, when we start making guesses, we tend to do things "our way" - and a surprising amount of times, a difficult support case comes down to some tiny thing that the developer did differently in their environment or solution or project that we just didn't think of because we tend to do things in our certain ways that we have tested over time (related to Atalasoft)

The log story short here is that we are asking for complete solutions and repros with your code not because we can't come up with one ourselves, but because when we do these we're often having to fill in a LOT of gaps with assumptions and "how we do it" and it's often in those very things that the root cause lies.

So, please, understand we're not asking for a repro solution because we're not capable of reproducing things. Usually we're asking for them after we've already quickly thrown together a test/repro using our standard practices and it's not reproducing. That non-reproduction is often a sign that the issue is in the customer code. There are a lot if different ways to configure and code things, and it may be an interaction of an edge case bug in our component that just doesn't come up unless there's a very specific environment / approach.

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First Step: Just zip it up

Generally, we want to start with a zipped up Visual Studio solution

IMPORTANT: INCLUDE THE WHOLE THING

Please do not leave out the solution file level. Many customers attach repros as projects instead of solutions.

Our support engineers are capable of pulling them into new solutions, but the extra work makes it take longer to reply and the guessing/ filling in blanks can lead to us missing a key detail.

Have a look. If the whole thing zipped up is < 5MiB, you're done

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Second Step: Delete bin and obj folders in the zip

So, when you build your solution, a lot of things get put into the bin and obj directories. These directories are meant to be rebuilt by VS any time they're gone, so these are the lowest hanging fruit and often removing them is enough to make the solution fit.

In modern Windows, if you double click on your zip, Windows Explorer opens it up in a temp location. so double click that zip and then go in to each project folder in the solution and delete the bin and obj directories entirely

Once you do this, close it and see if it's small enough

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Third Step: Delete the .vs and packages folders

Solutions that use our NuGet packages, and solutions made in newer versions of Visual studio "helpfully" include .vs and packages folders.

Yes, I know earlier I asked for the solution but mostly I really wanted the .sln file - it's just easier to say "the solution" - so double click that zip again and delete the .vs and package folders out of the solution folder

This will often get it small enough

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Fourth Step: Web Projects

If you're giving us a web project using our WebDocumentViewer and/or WebCapture there are some WebResource files that are very large and not needed for us

It's useful to us to see what version of our components you included BUT especially in WebCapture we do NOT need the Kofax.WebCapture.Installer.msi or the Kofax.WebCapture.macOS.pkg. Those are about 13MiB and 11MiB respectively. Som double click that zip and remove these files from your repro

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Fifth Step: OcrResources

If your project contains any of our Ocr Resource files, these take up a lot of space. Go ahead and remove them from the zip.

NOTE: if they were in the default (bin) then they're already gone, but if you had included them as project files etc... they're there

Sixth Step: Perceptive DLLs

The Perceptive Filter DLls needed by some components can not be referenced, and thus must be directly added to the project as content

If your project added any of these remove them from the zip:

• ISYS11df.dll
• ISYSreaders.dll
• ISYSreadershd.dll
• Perceptive.DocumentFilters.dll

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Alternate Means of getting us files

Hopefully, you've gotten your file under the senselessly small 5 MiB limit for case attachment.

If its still too big, you can use options like a zip tool such as z-zip that offers to break it up into 5 MiB chunks

Your other option is to put it on a URL you can give to us to download

If none of those work you can contact support in your case and tell us you have a file too big to attach to the case, and we can try and come up with another means such as providing a dropbox link.

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Last update

2025-12-03 - TD

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