My question is whether or not anybody knows of a better way to do what I'm already doing. I'm creating a report as a list, and trying to render it both in HTML and Excel.
I'm developing a shiny app that generates reports for Qualtrics surveys.
The results table is a list of HTML strings that I paste together and display in a shinydashboard. Here's a dput of the example results tables.
Here's how I'm creating the html results tables list -- the html_tabelize() function in my package. Here's a dput of the example input.
In the shiny server.R file the way I create the Excel file is with the following code:
output$downloadResults <- downloadHandler(
filename = 'tables.xls',
content = function(file) {
write(html_tabelize(main()[['blocks']]), file)
}
)
To summarize: I get the blocks, I run html_tabelize on them, and then I write the HTML output to a file called "tables.xls". When I open that file, because Excel can render HTML, it renders something like this:
My concern and problem with what I'm doing are two-fold:
If I were writing an Excel document instead of simply rendering HTML in Excel, then I could perhaps get a better formatted document. I'd like that.
When you download the results tables xls file and try to open it, you get a warning from Excel. I don't want the users of my app to see this warning, because it's distracting and could worry them about something that isn't really a concern.
I know that options exist for writing Excel files in R, but so far what I've seen indicates that their input must be either a data frame, or a list of data frames. The list I am rendering from has different types of components, like the question text, as well as data frames of results. Originally I was using pandoc, but pandoc, even when run from R, is a system binary, and it's difficult to list as a dependency (and if I can't list it as a dependency, it's tough to make sure it's installed for the users of my app). Additionally, I found out pandoc doesn't even convert to "real" Excel -- it also just saves HTML in a .xls file. Does anybody have any suggestions as to how I can improve this part of my app?
Related
I wanted to develop a small search website where I will be storing the data in XML files. When we search anything, it should display those data as table format in html. How does one retrieve the data from XML files?
Below is the basic thing to display data of only two columns, but I want to display data dynamically:
html file:http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_applications.asp
This is the sample code for retrieving the data from xml only for two columns.
Well the first problem I see is that you have two functions in there that are not being called. Nothing programmatic will happen in this scenario. When you have a method you need to call said method with myFunction(). I would recommend reading up a little more on javascript instead of copying and pasting it and expecting it to just "work"
To further elaborate, you removed the function call from the example you took when you took off the button. What is your xml endpoint? (it's not going to be the same as the example unless you build it to be that way). In this example it's just an xml file that is hosted on the server with the same root as the html.
I wan't to merge multiple access reports to one pdf file using vba code. This vba code needs to work on the computers at my work. These computers only contain Adobe Reader, and I am not able to install Acrobat because I am not Administrator. So now my code generates for all the reports a seperate pdf. I had some code to merge these pdf files to one pdf file where I use 'Acrobat.CAcroApp'. But i get an error on line:
Set AcroApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.App")
I think I am not able to do this cause the computers only have Adobe Reader installed. Is there a possibility to create one pdf file for multiple reports/pdfs without using Acrobat.
Thx in advance
2 solutions.
Make a master report that has each individual report embedded as a sub report. If it's just a few, it should work fine, but too many may bog down / crash the application.
Here's a VBA way of doing it here.
Without acrobat reader this is indeed not going to work. I, however, am using the following dirty workaround for users without acrobat;
Export all your reports to rich text ("*.RTF" format) in the same folder. Afterwards, you open a word application via access vba, and loop through the RTF files and then copy them into your word file, with a page break after every insert. Then, you save the word document as a .PDF file.
This is a method prone to errors, so if a more experienced user has a better way, please do tell. I'm interested as well!
I want to create .csv files with the Report Generation Toolkit in Labview.
They must actually be .csv files which can be opened with Notepad or something similar.
Creating a .csv is not that hard, it's just a matter of adding the extension to the file name that's going to be created.
If I create a .csv file this way it opens nicely in excel just the way it should, but if I open it in Notepad it shows all kind of characters and it doesn't even come close to the data I wrote to the file.
I create the files with the Labview code below:
Link to image (can't post image yet because I've got to few points)
I know .csv files can be created with the Write to Spreadsheet VI but I would like to use the Report Generation Toolkit because it's pretty easy to add columns and rows to the file and that is something I really need.
you can use the Robust CSV package on the lavag.org forum to read and write 2D arrays to CSV files.
http://lavag.org/files/file/239-robust-csv/
Calling a file "csv" does not make it a CSV file. I never used the toolkit to generate an Excel file, but I'm assuming it creates an XLS or XLSX file, regardless of what extension you give it, which is why you're seeing gibberish (probably XLS, since it's been around for a while and I believe XLSX is XML, not binary).
I'm not sure what your problem is with the write spreadsheet VI. It has an append input, so I assume you can use that to at least add rows directly to a file, although I can't say I ever tried it. I would prefer handling all the data in memory explicitly, where you can easily use the array functions to add rows or columns to the array and then overwrite the entire file.
I've generated a table using play's #{list} tag and get pretty decent results. Now I need to be able to generate and download an xls version of the table and have no idea what to do. Any pointers at all will be much appreciated
Well you have various options.
Excel will open HTML files. So instead of rendering your table as HTML you can it to stream it to the browser and set the content type as XLS.
While Excel will open it this it will still be an HTML file rather than an XLS(X) document.
You can generate as CSV from your data model and stream this to the browser. Again this will be a CSV rather than a proper XLS(X) document.
There also seem to be some solutions around which can do it using Javscript. See as a starting point: Generate excel sheet from html tables using jquery
Finally you can can use something like Apache POI or JXLS to generate a 'proper' xls(x) document and stream this to the browser. I have some code here that will export HTML to 'proper' xlsx file if this is the route you wish to go. Workflow is then to create some HTML from your data model and use this to convert to Excel rather than having to programmatically build the Excel document using POI. https://github.com/alanhay/html-exporter
I have created a rrdcgi script to display information about the system performance with graphs. Now I would like to add an option for the users to create PDF on the fly with the details on current page (images and information) and header and footer. I also want the generated PDF files to be saved in some location so that that can be easily accessed next time. Is this possible to do with rrdcgi or any Perl code would be really appreciated.
I need this options
You need to consider what you want to put in the PDF: Do you want an exact replica of the web page the user is viewing (too hard to be close to impossible without having the user's browser installed on your side and using its print output) or do you want the same information in a roughly similar layout?
An important issue is how you are generating the HTML: I did something similar once to generate PDF receipts for experiment participants (now, I just output HTML with print styles).
The HTML is generated using HTML::Template although Template.pm would be just as fine.
It is then trivial to write another template, one that generates a LATEX document which can be processed using pdflatex. If you save the data the time the snapshot is requested, you can add the snapshot to a queue that generates documents asynchronously so that requests do not tie up the web server.
Update: Looking at rrdcgi, I now realize that it already does use a template. That is perfect: Instead of putting HTML in the template, put LATEX code in the template and run rrdcgi with the --filter option to create a LATEX source file which you can run through pdflatex. I guess the problem to solve there is to be able to use the exact same data that was used to generate the page the user is looking at.
If it is not possible to re-run rrdcgi with the exact same data, consider adding some JavaScript that submits the HTML source of the page the user is reviewing (or some JSON representation thereof) to a CGI script that parses the HTML and outputs LATEX. Writing clean HTML in the original template and judicious use of class and id attributes would help there.
I do not have time to test any of these ideas right now, but I will take a look again within the next couple of days.
Is it worth the effort?
Why don't you add a FAQ explaining how to setup a PDF-printer on Windows/MAC/Linux and provide a 'clean' page that can then be printed?
Since you apparently have to create the PDF,
take a look at this (what-is-the-best-perl-module-to-use-for-creating-a-pdf-from-scratch) post here on SO.
There is also this post, that could combine the 'clean' HTML page and a server-side print.
Regarding the LaTeX route, if you have rrdcgi generate graphs in pdf format, pdflatex will be able to integrate them directly into the document, producing super quality pdf with graphs ... very slick. Sorry, no code.