i was trying to understand in the Kentico's database model how can i change the web parts content using a database script.
So, basically i have a website based on Kentico with several articles, and internal hyperlinks in its content. But the problem is that the format of those hyperlinks are actually invalid. And i was looking for a way to build a script and do a bulk-update in order to replace some characters and update those hyperlinks to the valid format.
Any idea how can i build the query to get the content of all web parts used in all published pages.
Thank you
It depends on your web parts and how the content is rendered. There are different ways that web parts render their content:
The web part layout is used for markup
The ASCX file for the web part is used for markup
The web part makes use of a repeater that uses a Transformation to render the markup- The markup is generated in code behind
The last one can be tricky to change depending on the web part and whether you have access to all the code behind, but the others you can change either in code in your solution or within the Administration area itself.
Doing this in SQL would probably require a combination of T-SQL XML support and regular expressions to find what you're looking for. you effectively need to look in the CMS_WebPart and CMS_WebPartLayout tables to find what you're looking for.
However, reading your query, I'm not 100% sure you're talking about web parts, (my apologies if you are) as you talk about links in the article content itself. If these are set using the Editable text web part, then you need to look in the CMS_Document table at the DocumentContent field to find the links to replace. But you then need to look at how to correctly format those links going forward so that you do not need to repeat this process later.
Note:
You need to be really careful when doing this in SQL to make sure that you don't create invalid XML. Things go bad when you do that.
This won't flush your cache, so you'll need to clear your cache manually afterwards.
If you're using out-of-the-box web parts, you should really make a copy of them and use the copy if you're going to modify, this way, you're less likely to have pain in future upgrades.
Typically "content" is not set in a webpart. Webparts are configured to retrieve content from page types. There is an exception to this with specific webparts like Editable Text, Static Text, Static HTML, etc.
The configuration of a webpart is stored at the template level in the cms_pagetemplate table. The configuration for ALL webparts on that page template are stored in the PageTemplateWebParts field. So you'd have to parse through the XML and get the proper webpart and then perform an update on that field. You maybe able to do a regex to find that content and replace it as well.
Not ideal to do this via SQL simply because of version history and it can cause a lot of problems later on. I'd suggest finding out which API calls you can make to perform these updates and write a small program for it.
I have a document library set up with multiple different categories of document, and I'm using a metadata column to differentiate between them.
I want to be able to display two different document library web part on a page for different categories of file side by side. This is simple for one category, I just set up a list view filtered by the metadata column, but when I add a second web part alongside the first, it breaks the first one.
I have no idea why this is happening, but it seems like SharePoint isn't happy with pulling two sets of data from the same document library.
When I am editing the web parts, I can get them to both display the documents I want, but then when I click save, the first web part empties.
Not sure what other information would be useful for diagnosing or helping with the problem, so if I haven't given enough detail let me know. I am familiar with SPD as well as developing through the web interface, so if this needs a more complex solution that's fine with me!
Having spent some more time playing around with this, it struck me that I could probably achieve what I wanted using something other than a Document web part, and I was right.
Instead of using the somewhat inflexible document web part, I created a content query web part which only searched within the document library from my site, and filtered by the metadata column.
This way I can create as many queries as I like and they don't interact with each other in weird ways. It also has the advantage of being significantly easier to customise the output without needing to resort to SharePoint Designer.
Content Queries are the answer!
I want to add text to body element but I don't know how. Which method will work on the body tag?
Sorry for my english and thanks for replies.
In Watir, you can manipulate a web page (DOM) using JS, just like that:
browser.execute_script("document.getElementById('pageContent').appendChild(document.createTextNode('Great Success!'));")
I assume that the point of the question is:
All users are not just interacting by just clicking buttons and links on the web app, some of them are doing nasty things like altering http requests to make your system do something that it is not supposed to do... or to just have some fun.
To mimic this behavior, you could write a ui-test that alters forms on the web page, so that for example, one could type in anything into any field instead of a limited dropdown.
To do that, ui test has to:
manipulate DOM to set form inputs free of limitations (replace select's with input's, etc.)
ui test has to know, which values to use, in many cases it's pointless to enter random values. Your webapp has to provide some good "unwanted" options.
Why would you want to modify the webpage in Watir? It's for automated testing, not DOM manipulation.
If you want to add something to the DOM element in javascript, you can do it like that:
var txt = document.createTextNode(" This text was added to the DIV.");
document.getElementById('myDiv').appendChild(txt);
Or use some DOM manipulation library, like jQuery.
If you have not worked your way though the watir tutorial, I would suggest you do so. It deals with things like filling in text fields etc.
Learn to use the developer tools for your browser, Firebug for Firefox, or the built in tools for IE and CHrome. They will let you look at things as you interact with the site.
If the element is not a normal HTML input field of some sort, then you are dealing with a custom control. Many exist and they are varied and there is no one set solution for dealing with them. Without knowing which control you are using, and being able ourselves to interact with a sample of it, or at least see the HTML, it is very very difficult to advise you, we basically have to just guess (which is often a waste of everyone's time)
Odds are if you have a place you can enter text, then it is some form of input control, it might not start out that way, you may need to click on some other element, to make the input area appear, but without a sample of HTML all we can do is guess.
If this is a commercial control, see if you can find a demo site that shows the control in action. Try googling things like class names for the elements and often you get lucky
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Our company is looking to integrate invoices into a new system we are developing.
We require a solution to create a layout of the invoice and then convert to pdf.
We have considered just laying out the invoice in html/css then converting to pdf.
We have also considered using SVG->PDf conversion.
Both of these solutions integrate well into our existing templating language used for our web application.
Historically we have been a Microsoft based business and used Crystal Reports for such a task but we are looking for an open source Linux solution for this project.
Does any one have any suggestions of an approach or technology we could use for such a task?
Try this... create a blank invoice with Word (or whatever you want) and save it as a PDF.
Then use a PDF library to modify the PDF (insert the text at particular coordinates). We do this in the Microsoft world and it is extremely easy.
The biggest benefit is that we can use our own tools to create and modify the template. If we want to add some static text, we just crank open Word, make the change and save it to a PDF file (that is being used as a template).
For Microsoft, we use iTextSharp which is actually a C# port of the original Java version of iText
Additionally...
You can use Adobe Acrobat to insert fields in the PDF (address, phone, invoice number, line item 1, line item 2, etc...) and then use iText/iTextSharp to populate these fields at run time.
This is, in more detail, what we do... and it is extremely easy.
The normal way is to install (La)TeX (probably already on the linux box) and run pdflatex to get the pdfs. You can also use Apache FOP, if you prefer xslt and xsl-fo.
If the number of invoices to create is low you might want to use open-office (directly or as a toolkit).
If you want high-precision positioning and low-level access, a low-level pdf library (I don't know if iTextSharp works with mono) might be what you want.
I would try out LaTeX first, because it allows you to get results with the least effort.
I've previously produced invoices by templating a PostScript file, and then using Ghostscript's ps2pdf to convert those into PDFs.
We use Reportlab with Python. If you look around there are a load of ready-made forms/invoices/etc.
There are several OSS reporting engines (Jasper Reports, Pentaho and BIRT to name three) that you could use in much the same way as you have historically used Crystal Reports. One of the other posters mentions ReportLab, which is an option if you're using Python or can embed a Python runtime in your application.
Probably the most flexible solution is to create XMLs with invoice data and then by using XSLTs transform the, into PDFs, HTMls, whatever...
It depends on your environment. If you have access to Java, you might look at iText (http://www.lowagie.com/iText/), a library that allows you to generate PDF files on the fly.
There are two steps, if i understood correctly:
1) Creation of PDF template with placeholders to populate data programmatically
2) Populating the PDF template programmatically during run time
For #1, OpenOffice allows creation of PDF templates, which can then be populated programmatically. It's good enough to create simple invoices that doesn't probably involve datagrid/table kind of stuff.
For #2, you already have the answers here - iText, iTextSharp.
Hope this helps!
I love wkhtmltopdf http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
Not sure what your goal is here, but there is an opensource php-library called fpdf, which also has an extension for taking a pre-made pdf as layout and then populate it with more content, generating a new PDF with that info.
However, I would go for a solution that you can integrate nicely into the plattform you're building, but I wouldn't go in a HTML->PDF solution since you won't have any clue about what would fit on a piece of paper regarding sizes in that kind of enviroment, meaning you won't know when you should split the content into two separate templates.
You might also try using XSL:FO. XSL:FO is a documented standard for describing page layout: http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/#fo-section.
I've had success on two projects creating documents by creating an XML schema that defines the content of the "PDF". I then use the XSD tool (from Microsoft) to generate a class representing this document. I then map my data into that structure, serialize the populated class to XML, along with an XSL stylesheet that defines how that data should be mapped into FO, and pass it to an FO formatter. For formatters, I have use Alt-Soft's Xml2Pdf with success. There are a few others out there. There are some tools available to help create the XSL to FO stylesheet (i.e. stylusstudio and XmlSpy), but I recommend learning the FO constructs as the tools seem to produce bloated stylesheets. FO is comparable to HTML (where a P tag is a BLOCK tag in FO), but can be tricky. This nice thing about FO, is that some formatter support conversion to other formats, such as Word, HTML, etc.
Other options:
iTextSharp (C# port of iText). Just started reading about this. Open source and free. I don't think there is any "templating" supported with this, but I could be wrong about that.
SQL Server Reporting Services. Assuming your invoice data is in, or can be put in, a format that can be read by reporting services (SQL Server, Web Service, etc), define the layout in SSRS and then publish to reporting server. Use SSRS Web Services or query parameter execution to execute the report and have it output as PDF.
This html-2-pdf site may be a helpful starting point: http://maarten.lippmann.us/?p=101
A site a friend of mine built uses a script to churn HTML pages into printable PDFs, too - http://philambdaupsilon.org. Not sure on the exact details of it, but he is an SO user, and I'll send this question to him, too.
Unfortunately, the best system on the market (at present) is passing the HTML & CSS to a ColdFusion server and have that return the rendered PDF. So if money isn't a big concern, this is the quickest to deploy solution that'll render the best results.
I've tried very hard to get FPDF, TCPDF, the R&OS pdf class, and even CodeIgniter's recommendation to work, but nothing with stable output for anything beyond the most basic/bland HTML files.
Honestly, if the ColdFusion solution isn't viable, I'd use html2ps, and then ps2pdf to convert your files into a PDF.
(This is all assuming that you don't want to take the time and design each PDF using the native PDF-creator code in PHP. This is what systems like SugarCRM use. Though its very functional with stable results, the actual creation of each PDF-generator file is a most painful process)
We have used Jasper Reports before. It's not what you'd call user-friendly, but it will talk directly to your database.
html2pdf works very well. You can use this to generate both HTML and PDF reports from the same source.
I'm fiddling with Black Sheep Invoices right now, which is great at first but now I'm having trouble actually getting it to render the PDFs. Lots of installation difficulties--probably a lot easier on your own server but i'm up on a shared host with it. The HTML output and data management portions are well done though, which is something you won't get out of just creating a postscript template. I was hoping to find a reference to a library that has an active development team though (Black Sheep is not being updated at this time).
If you want browser perfect HTML converted to PDF then try commandlineprint
You'll need to install firefox on a linux distro, disable all firefox alerts and then run it through a virtual display. Check this thread for more details.
It's infuriating to get running well but does give you the best results for HTML to PDF conversion I've seen.
OK, a search of Google Code projects turned up Simple Invoices, which is awesome and well maintained.
I use TROFF for my invoices because of its extremely simple textual encoding. The logic is a few lines of Perl. Keeping it simple.
For a Ruby solution, try Prawn: http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com/
I use open office on the server and then generate the XML for the document (just unzip the document and hack away)
Some can use Dhek template editor to define area/placeholder for existing PDF, without altering existing document, and then populate it to generate final doc (e.g. with user values from a form): https://github.com/applicius/dhek .