Breaking change in v17.4 data sources, concurrency defect in v15.2 - Need a fix in one or the other

To whom it may concern,

I am the Director of Product for Zuora Billing, the Global leader in subscription management and billing. We have used Aspose as our MS-Word/PDF engine since the company’s inception. Last year, I purchased a new license to upgrade our Aspose implementation (currently on 15.2) to the latest version of the library (then 17.4).

Due to several critical behavior changes between the two versions, we have been unable to complete the upgrade and are now out of support. My engineering team opened a series of tickets with your support team to address our concerns and received minimal assistance.

You can view the ticket history and comments from my engineering team here:
When we configured a number type merge field with custom format in an invoice template, and merge the template in multiple thread environment with different data sources and save as PDF files, the data rendered in one PDF may mix with the other PDF.

We opened the following ticket to Aspose around Fri, Feb 17, 2017
https://forum.aspose.com/t/21589 Generated document contains data of another document in multi-threading environment

 After we got Aspose.words 17.4 for java, we got more issues during our upgrade. The following are some tickets I created to Aspose.
   
https://forum.aspose.com/t/how-to-make-all-the-merge-fields-merged/162452 How to make all the merge fields merged
https://forum.aspose.com/t/null-pointer-exception-when-merging-a-template/169135 Null Pointer exception when merging a template
https://forum.aspose.com/t/why-doesnt-the-mailmerge-work-with-ifieldmergingcallback/169067/3 Why doesn’t the MailMerge work with IFieldMergingCallback
https://forum.aspose.com/t/how-to-get-the-outer-if-field/167923 How to get the outer if field

The current issue we have with v17.4, for which we purchased a license, is that it has changed the way it uses merge field data sources in a way that is incompatible with our system and which we have not been able to workaround. v15.2 does not have this problem. However v15.2 has a serious concurrency issue, in which when the library is used in a multi-threaded environment, occasionally the library erroneously inserts information from one document instance into another instance. This is a catastrophic error for our billing application that needs to produce correct billing documents every time.

We would like to request that the concurrency fix your team created for this issue in v 17.4 be back-ported to v15.2 since we were not able to resolve this issue while our license was still under paid support due to the breaking behavior change your team introduced in the new version (and declined to correct when we raised a support issue about it).

Please let me know if I can provide additional information on this topic and any recommended steps you can offer that will help me resolve the issue. Thanks.

@nicholas_harlow_zuora_com,

It seems that your only outstanding issue is WORDSNET-16235. Regarding WORDSNET-16235, we have completed the analysis of this issue and the root cause has been identified. We will most likely provide the fix of this issue in next release of Aspose.Words for Java. Please follow this thread for further proceedings.

I am afraid, we do not provide support for old versions of Aspose.Words for Java. We also do not provide any fixes or patches for old versions. All fixes and new features are always added into latest versions of Aspose.Words for Java.

We suggest you please acquire a 30-day Temporary License (please refer to How to get a Temporary License?) and evaluate the latest version of Aspose.Words for Java i.e. 18.6 on your end. Hope, this helps.

If you still see any issue with latest version of Aspose.Words for Java i.e. 18.6, please report them in Aspose.Words forum for further proceedings. Thanks for your cooperation.