I would like to generate multiple pdfs at once. Those pdfs should pull data from a database. It can be an excel table or a relational database, doesn't matter, I can create whatever.
Using excel and javascript in adobe acrobat pro I managed to pull data into a template pdf, but for every record (row) I have in excel table I have to manually generate one pdf, then another, and so on.. and there are a lot of records, so I would like to do that automatically if possible.
Is there a way to do that? Any suggestions?
I added an image to better explain it...
Look into the Acrobat SDK, Section: "Interapplication Communication" to learn how you can control Acrobat via VB/VBA and how you can work with the JavaScript Object (JSO).
Then have a look into the "Acrobat JavaScript Scripting reference" and look at
the Doc Object with commands like .. addField and at
the Field object to set the properties of the fields.
That should do what you want, Reinhard
PS: With Open Office you can save spreadsheets as PDF and with newer version of Excel too. Wouldn't that be already enough or perhaps a mix of above and this.
Full disclosure: I founded and run Epsillion Software.
mirta, one option is Epsillion Publisher. We built it for your exact use case.
You would need to specify what your template should look like. The Epsillion team will design it for you.
You then specify what your variables are in a Word document (e.g., name, last name, date of birth). The software will process the Word and Excel files and return PDFs for you.
Templates are flexible and flow as needed.
Hope that helps. Good luck!
Related
With newly released Webi there's no way to manipulate reports with VBA like it was in DESKI era.
I'd like to know if there's a way for me to click a button with parameters in Excel sheet and get a report from the server?
I've been thinking of using the RESTful Web-services but it seems that there is a performance problem.
I also considered using a JAVA app in the middle using the SDK but it's not really satisfying as I add one layer.
Do you know if there's an other way to download a Webi report from and to Excel?
For this type of requirement, you'd normally use the OpenDocument feature. There is one thing that it won't do however, at least not for Webi documents, and that is deliver the output in Excel format (HTML and PDF are the two possible formats for Webi). In all fairness, the export to Excel option is only about two or three clicks away, but I can understand that this wouldn't be an ideal solution.
Another option is the Java SDK, which I would not recommend, as the ReBEAN SDK (the part of the Java SDK you need to interface with Webi documents) is deprecated and replaced by the REST SDK.
The REST SDK would be the way to go if the OpenDocument feature is not sufficient. Keep in mind that this would involve quite a few steps, each time sending a command to the WACS server and then decoding the answer. The steps would be:
Authenticate and get a logon token
Refresh the document (if necessary pass prompt values)
Export the document to Excel
Close the document
The REST interface is only supported on the WACS server, which should run on your BI4 server (unless you have a customised landscape). If it's slow, I would suggest looking into the root cause of this performance issue, instead of discarding the SDK altogether.
If you're going to use the REST interface, I would recommend opting for JSON to communicate through REST instead of XML. It's easier to read and parse.
A last option, which I wouldn't recommend, is LiveOffice. This is a separate product which allows you to embed contents from Webi documents into Office documents (most notably Excel). LiveOffice has always had its share of problems and has not received much love from SAP regarding much needed updates.
One final thought: the report will never appear in the same sheet, at least not without an additional amount of coding. Whatever SDK you end up choosing, you will always end up with an Excel file. If you want to show the results in the Excel file you started from, you'll need to code the steps to open the generated file, grab the contents and then copy those to your worksheet.
I have a document library in Sharepoint 2010. Is it possible to click on the check boxes next to a document name and convert the documents to pdf? I can't seem to find an option to do this. If not can I programmatically generate the pdf's and add them to the library.
Actually, if you have some programming skills you can create your own EventReceiver for every item added/updated to convert a word document to a PDF. By using Word Automation Services.
check this out:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ff181518.aspx
You'll need a third party product as PDF Conversion doesn't come with SharePoint, unless you count the very basic MS-Word only conversion that is available in some editions of SharePoint 2010.
Have a look at this product, it does exactly what you want, including the checkboxes in SP2010, and can be used via workflows and web service calls as well.
Additional information as well as real world examples can be found here.
Disclaimer, I work for this vendor so it is a shameless plug. Yet it answers your question :-)
Alice,
Or you can use dynamic PDF documents, which can be integrated with Document Library as content types. Have a look at this product: it allows submitting Pdf forms using Adobe Reader (no Reader Extensions are necessary).
Disclaimer: I am using this product and happy with it. It has some limitations but nothing drastic.
Robert
MS Word provides the convert function, you can open the Word document and save as PDF format in the document library.
Also, there are some third-part tools can help you to solve this issue, such as BoostSolutions PDF Converter.
How can I read an Open Office 3.0 spreadsheet (.ods) from Groovy? I'd like to select specific columns from a named worksheet. Ideally, it would be useful to add a 'where' clause, or other criteria clause.
I've never used it, but Open Office has a Java API, which of course you could use from Groovy as well. It looks like the best places to start reading are the Developer's Guide, the Java UNO Reference, and the samples in Java and (hey!) Groovy. Hope that helps!
Might be something here at Spring Factories or here at Groovy and JMX. There is a forum for Groovy and Open Office.
Could you export the table / spreadsheet as SQL entries then use that. You could also look at this plugin for goovy -- http://www.ifcx.org/
OpenOffice documents are ZIP files which contains the document data as XML plus some other files (style sheets for word documents). Details can be found here.
The main problem with calc is formulas. If you just have tabular data, then you can simply read the cell values and use that. So you can open the ZIP archive, read the content.xml in it and parse that with any XML parser.
But when a cell contains a formula, then you need to execute it. In this case, you will have to open the document via the UNO API. Here is the Java version. There is a link where you can download example code that explains how to open ODF documents and how to examine their content. There are also snippets but none of them show how to examine a sheet.
The main disadvantage of UNO is the documentation. Each method is explained somewhere but you have to find the method which solves your problem, first.
Since the title does not mention Groovy (only question specifics does), I didn't want to make this a new question.
How to generally read an Open Office spreadsheet document? There are tools for creating one (ooo-python) but not for reading one. They are XML but just bluntly diving into that and trying to get the right logic of extracting the data I want seems so sub-optimal.
What I'd like is features similar to Excel COM support, but from a command line tool (or scripting language).
Our product has the requirement of exporting its native format (essentially an XML file) to Excel for viewing/editing. However, what this entails is having a dependency on Excel (or Office) itself for our product build - something that we do not want.
What we have done is export the data from our native format to a csv file which can be opened in Excel. If user selects an option to open the generated report as well, we (try to) launch Excel application to open it (ofcourse it requires Excel to be already present on the client system).
The data for most part is flat list of records.
Is there a better format (or even a better way) to handle this requirement? This is a common requirement for many products - how do you handle this?
Excel versions, both 2007 and several previous, have native XML formats. 2007, obviously, is XML by default, and earlier versions have the ability to save as XML. This SO question deals with the issue. I'd guess a little inspection would give an idea of what's required. I don't know if a XSD/DTD exists for older versions, but a little creative Googling might yield something.
As other people pointed out, it is reasonably easy to generate Excel XML files. You can do this in multiple ways. For example:
By creating a template Excel XML document, and then using XML DOM to stuff your data into the template, or
Converting the template Excel XML into an XSLT, and then simply passing your proprietary XML as input to XSLT.
I'm using ExcelPackage to create spreadsheets in one of my side projects. Works pretty good, but (at least the version I'm using) its a bit limited when it comes to styling and calculations.
ExcelPackage lets you create OOXML docs (.xslx files) that are natively compat with 2k7, but you can download a plugin for previous versions of Office from MS.
We export our data either using Excel objects (COM based code) on client side or CSV file (usually on server side, but can be used on client side too). And we allow copy data from grids in simple html format, what can be pasted into Excel without problems.
For one customer we even had to export data [from sql stored procedure] into csv-like tab-separated format, but named file like xxxxx.xls - this way excel opened that file in more correct way than csv file. Ugly hack, but worked well.
CSV is most compatible format (no dependencies on external applications or libraries), but customers don't like it. Maybe we need to incorporate some XLS export code, this way all users will be happy :)
If .csv isn't formatted enough, you could create a template in Excel, and use a little bit of VBA code to import the CSV and format it appropriately. This way your app is only concerned with generating the .CSV, and will use the same .XLS for each export.
If you're careful, you should be able to get this to work with most versions of Excel seamlessly.
With Perl there are several modules that can be used to produce .xlsx files without requiring an Office installation. Among those :
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::Writer::XLSX is the most well-known, with support for many Excel features like colors, formatting, etc.
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::ValueWriter::XLSX (I'm actually the author) has less features but is optimized for fast writing of large amounts of data
If you are working in Java, Checkout the POI project from APACHE.
http://poi.apache.org/
Simple, nice, complete, powerful.
We started with Office on the server, but that's not very nice. We had to kill processes that hung, and had quite a bit of a performance dip. We thought about putting it on a different machine, but didn't bother after trying and using Aspose (commercial). We don't have a very large number of simultaneous users, but complex documents. Simple ones can be handled easier with csv.
I've used FlexCel Studio for a couple of projects now. It's very functional and fast. 100% managed code, no dependencies. Sounds like you'd use the "Reports" feature which allows you to define an empty report template in Excel, then pass datatable and volia, it's populated with your data.
TMS Software
We use a combination of OleDB and Interop. We found that Interop was much faster and used less memory, but it's a pain for compatibility issues, especially when using different language installs of Office.
OleDb has the advantage that you don't require Excel to be installed on the client machine. Both Interop and OleDb support multiple sheets (tables) per workbook which you cannot do with csv.
If you're using C# or VB.Net, and your data is in a a DataSet, DataTable or List<>, then you can use my free "Export to Excel" class.
It uses the free Microsoft OpenXML libraries (so you don't need to have Excel on your server), and lets you export your data into a "real" .xlsx file with just one line of code, eg:
DataSet ds = CreateSampleData();
CreateExcelFile.CreateExcelDocument(ds, "C:\\Sample.xlsx");
All source code is provided on the following page along with a demo project, completely free of charge (and popups !)
http://mikesknowledgebase.com/pages/CSharp/ExportToExcel.htm
Hope this helps !
We are interested in trying to import an Excel spreadsheet into our Blog.
A sample of the Excel spreadsheet that we generate each day and want to export into our Blog is located at:
http://www.wallstreetsignals.com/WhatsWorking.html
Our Blog is located at:
http://whatsworkinginthestockmarket.blogspot.com/
We are interested in a program or method that would allow us to just import the Excel spreadsheet into our Blog instead of having to hand input all the data, which is what we are doing now.
Thank you for your thoughts and the cost to have you help accomplish our goal.
Philip
WallStreetSignals.com
Well, outside of creating a program (which is possible, using PHP, Perl, Java, etc and either an excel input module or converting to CSV or XML and processing that)...
Have you considered using Google Documents or another online spreadsheet software? It's easy to import an excel spreadsheet, and then embed the spreadsheet in the blog post or webpage. Then if you need to change it, modify the google document spreadsheet and the changes are rendered on the webpage or blog post immediately.
-Adam
The easiest thing might be to use Google Docs. Upload your spreadsheet, then publish from Google Docs to your blog. See this article.
Can your blog consume XML? You can set up an XML Schema in Excel 2007 and just export it to an XML file. You would need to write an XSLT.
I also have a macro that will write out XML to a file... can upload that if it would help...
If your spreadsheet is generated by a macro, you could just modify a macro to generate html or some other sort of blog markup ready for copy and paste.
Excel can save as HTML, which you could then strip the metadata from and use in your website. Unfortunately the HTML that it generates is very bloated. If you do not mind client lock-in, you could consider embedding the XLS file directly on your website, and having your viewers use the IE embedded excel viewer.
If you can use ASP.NET you could use SpreadsheetGear for .NET to load an Excel workbook, grab values, formatted values or even images to display on a web page. There are live ASP.NET samples with source if you want to check it out.
Disclaimer: I work for SpreadsheetGear LLC