we are currently building an application on the google cloud platform, which generates reports in Google Doc. For them, it is really important to have a table of content ... with page numbers. I know this is a feature request since a few years and there are add-ons (Paragraph Styles +, which didn't work for us) that provide this solution, butt we are considering to build this ourselves. if anybody has a suggestion on how we could start with this, it would be a great help!
thanks,
Best bet is to file a feature request on the product forums.
Currently the only way to do that level of manipulation of a doc to provide a custom TOC is to use Apps Script. It provides access to the document structure sufficient enough to build and insert a basic table of contents, but I'm not sure there's enough to do paging correctly (unless you force a page break on ever page...) There's no method to answer the question of "what page is this element on?"
Hacks like writing to a DOCX and converting don't work because TOCs are recognized for what they and show up without page numbers.
Of course you could write a DOCX or PDF with the TOC as you'd like and upload as a blob rather than as a Google Doc. They can still be viewed in Drive and such.
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 noticed that sitecore has the option of exporting users in an Excel format.
I need to have similar functionality for exporting 'participations', (a users can enlist to take part in an 'event', and if their entry is approved via a sitecore workflow, a 'participation' item is created in the content tree)
Since mostly everything in Sitecore is in essence based on items, and I want to export items to Excel, my question is - what are some of the best ways of doing this?
Questions:
Is there a way to re-use this functionality for regular items?
Would it be a good idea to create a custom admin page (any tips on doing this?) which has some custom code that reads the items from the database using the API?
are there sitecore plugins/shared source projects that can help me achieve this?
Or does anyone have a better idea? - would it be better to just store the participations in SQL? I'm mostly doing it this way because I want to make use of the 'free' functionality offers, for example workflow, but if that leads to me using anti-patterns please shoot me ;)
Link is different now: https://marketplace.sitecore.net/en/Modules/Advanced_System_Reporter.aspx
P.S. Couldn't leave a comment to original answer as I don't have enough reputation. Oh well :)
Found a most excellent shared source module which does exactly this (and much more)!
Basically it allows you to configure (and easily extend, if you need to) any kind of table based report on 'items'.
The report module shows up as an application in the sitecore menu (like the user manager tool) and comes with features such as xml,csv, xls export. It's also really easy to set up, once you get the hang of it.
http://trac.sitecore.net/AdvancedSystemReporter
I need to create a calendar which will join together data from a number of separate sharepoint team calendars (it's so that the press office in my organisation can see what's happening in each department side-by-side on the same page - what they would like is something like the ui for a shared google calendar).
I have discovered that I can create a linked source in Sharepoint which combines the various calendars and will provide xml output of the data I need. So what I would like now is an example of how to consume some xml and create the standard day/week/month views in a read-only calendar to my users.
What I have discovered is the following:
You can't attach a listviewwebpart - they use caml instead of xslt - they can't consume xml data. They use the object model to consume the list that it belongs to.
No source code for that web part. It's locked in a dll.
The dataformwebpart can consume any xml data source.
Some listviewwebparts can be changed to dataformwebparts but not the calendar.
Is there an example of an xslt calendar which can consume some xml and create the standard day/week/month views to get me going?
This is a common request, and not very easy with the standard web parts. You could try Ton Stegeman's Content by Type web part which I think allows you to roll up list items into a calendar, or alternatively take a look at (commercial) list rollup and calendar+ webparts from Bamboo Solutions.
http://www.ideseg.com/SharePointXSLToRenderCalendarsWithCsegRollUp.aspx
From Carlos Segura Blog, excelent way to do the Calendar Join.
It is very common now to expect you can add another calendar as a 'layer' along with an existing one. E.g. that is what we do in Google calendar, in outlook, on android. I believe this is how it is intended, and it ends the quest for sync tools, query questions, data webparts.
The same thing can be done in OOTB Sharepoint; see link below where they seem to have found the right answer. It is very easy to load an additional calendar once you vreated a calendar view.
http://weblogs.asp.net/sharadkumar/archive/2010/03/12/aggregate-sharepoint-event-items-into-your-calendar-view-using-calendar-overlay.aspx
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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 .