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  3. July 2021

Re: Opinions and experiences with ReportBro

Hi Nathan, sorry for the late answer.

Il giorno mer 30 giu 2021 alle ore 17:48 Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>
ha scritto:

Hi Marco,

I appreciate your feedback. Could you further explain your concern about
generating documents vs. reports? Also explain what data-source options
you're interested in?

Our target is to enable the end user to modify (or create) templates. They
need to be able to handle basic text, formatting, tables, and bulleted and
numbered lists. Furthermore, they must be able to insert placeholders for
the data and condition the presence or absence of certain sections based on
specific conditions. This last part is managed (today) by Freemarker.
An average document contains 70 to 90 pages, the final document (usually)
20 to 30 pages. This is due to the application of the If clauses:
[if OrderHeader.OrderType = 'Toys']
This order contains [if OrderHeader.Attributes.Dangerous = 'Yes']dangerous
[/if]Toys
[/if]

As for the data source we prefer to use Json.

In regard to generating documents, from my perspective that's what
templates are great for, whether generating HTML, XML, JSON, or other
formatted documents. A single program might generate any number of
formatted output streams based on the same data source; just use an RPG API
to merge the data source with whatever template might be selected.

Documents may be complex. For example, one of our applications generates a
roughly 15 page education plan for students, which consists of content from
something like 30 different data sources. The template for the education
plan is a single HTML file that has many sections.


How do you choose which sections to print and which not to print?


There are many WYSIWYG options for designing HTML templates. Our preference
is an old version of Dreamweaver. HTML provides pixel-level control over
layout and can be supplemented by CSS styles.


I'll check if they have a usable version in a browser (javascript
compatible).


The following link shows generating a marriage certificate in PDF format
from a web data-entry form. The same HTML template is used for both the web
form and the PDF document. So data sources may be web forms, or JSON, or
XML, or IBM i databases, or whatever.

http://rd.radile.com/rdweb/info2/ibmiui19.html

Nathan.






On Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 5:20 AM Marco Facchinetti <
marco.facchinetti@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Nathan, thanks.

What we are looking for is something like that but with something more
and,
especially, oriented to document production rather than report
production.

We have been using for many years a combination of freemarker (see
https://freemarker.apache.org/) and xdocreport (see
https://github.com/opensagres/xdocreport) with excellent results.
The best part was the support of Libre Office to edit documents
(templates)
even if it's not integrated in the browser it's acceptable since the
document's final quality was really good.
We recently had problems because xdocreport is not very up to date and
some
documents have errors and it is not easy to correct the code at that
level, so we too have thought about using HTML and freemarker but I can't
find a wysiwyg editor that integrates freemarker syntax (and datasource)
with HTML5.

ReportBro has some nice futures (a javascript editor and a wide range of
options as datasource) but since I don't know the company I'm looking for
refrences.

Best regards
--
Marco Facchinetti

Mr S.r.l.

Tel. 035 962885
Cel. 393 9620498

Skype: facchinettimarco


Il giorno mar 29 giu 2021 alle ore 19:58 Nathan Andelin <
nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>
ha scritto:

Marco,

We output hundreds of reports to browsers from RPG programs by merging
program data (normally returned from DB I/O) with HTML templates, which
generates HTML output streams for browsers. We transform HTML streams
to
PDF reports via an RPG API. This link shows an example of that.

http://rd.radile.com/rdweb/info2/ibmiui14.html

It appears that ReportBro does something similar, except using Python
as
opposed to RPG.

Nathan.



On Mon, Jun 28, 2021 at 12:49 PM Marco Facchinetti <
marco.facchinetti@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi, I am looking for a product to replace our current solution using
xdocreport and freemareker combination to produce mail merge style
documents (data and conditions).

The baseline is:
- a document editor to be integrated into the web management system
(javascript)
- produce documents in Pdf format (medium/high quality and
complexity)

One of the possible products is ReportBro. Anyone have experiences
with
their products?

Or alternatives to suggest?

TIA
--
Marco Facchinetti

Mr S.r.l.

Tel. 035 962885
Cel. 393 9620498

Skype: facchinettimarco
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