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The other posts on this subject go basically where I was going: If you have a "template" then merging the data is pretty straight forward. In Java you could use Freemarker to render the templates into the final document. You could also use CGIDEV2 to merge the data in RPG. It just depends upon the approach you want to take and the language you are most comfortable with.

As was also mentioned, you could generate PDF's from the template. All of this can be accomplished with Open Source tools using Java. Most of it could also be accomplished with Open Source or, at least, free tools in RPG (not sure about the RTF to PDF piece in RPG).

Plenty of options.

Pete


Jonathan Mason wrote:
Hi Pete

I suppose what they are basically looking for is a means of using Word for
generating their forms, for example an invoice, and to populate the form
with AS400 data rather than print the forms over the AS400 data.

Mail merge could work to a certain extent by including all header
information (e.g. name, address, etc) on each detail record in the data
source, but this seems cumbersome.

>From an AS400/iSeries/i5/System i perspective I would do whatever coding
necessary in RPG, on the PC I could muddle something together in VB.

All the best

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pete Helgren
Sent: 17 January 2007 15:36
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Microsoft Word and the iSeries

OK. If mail merge (in Windows) isn't what you want, then you could potentially use several other approaches to generating a "document" on the System i. Perhaps a bit more about the solution you envision would be helpful. What languages are you comfortable with? What volumes of documents are you anticipating?

Pete Helgren

I thought about using mail merge and then discounted it for a couple of
reasons:

1) The need to be able to have (potentially) header, detail and footer
data
to be merged and

2) The additional manual steps needed to run the mail merge

Ideally they want to be able to generate the document on the iSeries and
place it in the IFS where Word can find it.  I also thought about
generating
an RTF file and including replacement codes such as %%ORDERNO%% which the
programs could overwrite with the correct values, but on looking at an RTF
file's structure it looked too prone to errors.

Thanks

Jonathan


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