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DCC without detours: digital calibration certificates straight from calServer

24 July 2026

A calibration certificate as a PDF is made for people. For the system on the other end it is a dead end: retype it, scan it, or in the worst case let OCR guess. That is why calServer produces digital calibration certificates (DCC) following the PTB schema 3.3.0 directly from the calibration record. No extra tool, no converter, no detour through a spreadsheet.

What the DCC contains

The generated certificate is a complete, schema-conformant XML document:

  • Administrative data: calibration laboratory, customer, device with identification and serial number, order and certificate references, timestamps
  • Measurement results: measurement points with nominal value, actual value, unit in SI notation, tolerance and measurement uncertainty
  • Measurement conditions from the procedure — temperature, humidity and pressure
  • Recalibration date and the applied test procedure including its version

What the DCC does not carry

Reference standards and the traceability chain are not part of the generated DCC. Traceability is documented in the calibration certificate and in the standards table of the calibration, not in the XML. Also not included: conformity statement, second signatory and bilingual texts. The complete list is in the manual under Digital Calibration Certificate (DCC).

The rendered PDF certificate can be embedded into the same document as base64 (dcc:dataBase64, MIME type application/pdf). The result is one file that humans and machines both read, instead of two artefacts that can drift apart.

Validated before it leaves the building

Every generated XML is checked against the PTB XSD. And calServer checks beforehand whether the record even meets the prerequisites: if mandatory data is missing, the system names it instead of shipping a document that fails schema validation at the recipient. That removes the loop which actually costs time in practice: generate DCC, customer reports an error, hunt for the cause, generate again.

Automatable through the API

The export does not depend on someone pressing a button:

POST /api/v2/calibrations/{ctag}/dcc

The endpoint requires the calibration_view and using_API permissions. With that, customers can collect their own certificates, a goods-receipt system can process them automatically on arrival, and a QM system can archive them without a manual step.

Who benefits

  • Accredited laboratories that want or need to deliver conformant results to their customers in machine-readable form
  • Industrial customers whose incoming inspection checks calibration data automatically against their own requirements instead of filing PDFs
  • Operators of mixed landscapes: DCC generation is database-independent and behaves identically on MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server

DCC generation is enabled system-wide through the enable_dcc_plugin feature flag. The mapping between calServer fields and DCC elements is configurable and ships with the report templates, so customer-specific fields can be included.

Technical details, XML structure and setup: DCC export.