I have a application that generates a couple of different mails. These mails are currently build up using a string builder that generates a HTML based string that is the mail content.
This approach is getting messy. The code is objects mixed with HTML, etc, etc. What I'd like is to have a template similar to the one used in for example MVC and then use the output of this template to add to the mail.
Can this be done using for example T4 add how wound that work or should I use another approach for this?
The templates don't have to be editable at runtime even if that would be nice.
It can be done with T4. It would work exactly the way it does in MVC.
You should consider getting the Clarius T4 Editor, as Visual Studio does not come with intellisense for T4 out of the box, and the Clarius T4 editor can provide that.
Have you considered just using XSLT? You can easily create HTML documents from raw XML by applying an XSL Transform in .Net
We store XSL templates in the database, and use a simple NAME/VALUE pair approach to populate the templates in code. It is very effective and flexible, and the output can be piped to the browser easily. Alternatively you could just store the individual templates in files on the server and load them up that way.
Either way, the amount of code to implement this is relatively simple, and .Net has many classes in place to facilitate this. If you want an example of how we implemented this, leave a comment and I will append some code examples to this answer.
Related
I'm using a set of T4 templates in most of my MVC projects that create a set of Managers (think repositories), ViewModels and Extensions - utility extension methods such as ToModel(), ToViewModel() and ToSelectList(). So far so good. An enormous amount of basic 'plumbing' code is now written for me.
What I'd really like is an ability to configure variables that are used within those templates from an external file and then have the template use that file when executing.
I know I can run another T4 template from within another, but I can't find a way to add configuration in a separate file.
Presently, I include an 'Entity' table in my database and use that for configuration. It works but it feels dirty to have this in the database.
T4 is just C#/VB.Net code in the end, you can pretty much use any libraries you want. If you want an external configuration file you could use json.net and a simple json file in your project. At the start of your template, use the file io in the framework to read your json files contents, pass that to json.net and then extract the parameters you need. The most common way to use json.net is to serialize and deserialize classes but it also gives you access to a lower json dictionary like object that you can use linq to get any data you need from the json.
But remember there is always more then one way to solve a problem and this is a problem I have been trying to solve for a while. My preferred solution is an extension that I have created called T4 Awesome. My extension takes a totally different approach to using T4 for scaffolding inside Visual Studio. I add multiple tool windows and context menus around the IDE to make managing and using T4 templates faster and easier. I have a dynamic UI that lets you define simple parameters and pass them to your templates and also give you much more control over the final output files location. Feel free to check it out. And full disclaimer, I charge for this extension but have a free community version that should be able to do what you want.
I'm working on automating our company invoicing system. Currently all data is stored in our local MySQL database and someone manually updates an excel spreadsheet and then merges this data into a MS Word template. The goal is to automate this process so that the invoice can be generated from our intranet website as a PDF.
My original plan was to create a template in HTML/CSS and use wkhtmltopdf to generate the PDF but I ran into problems with getting a repeatable header and footer on each page. thead and tfoot aren't supported by Webkit and the fix suggested in this other question does not seem to work either.
So I then stumbled on using XML and XSL-FO, the latter I know nothing about. Is this the best path to take? Are there any libraries or utilities out there that will make converting my HTML+CSS into XML+XSL-FO easier? Are there any other alternatives I'm overlooking?
EDIT
Currently the server is CentOS Linux with a MySQL database. All other code is currently in PHP currently but that may change as the whole system is being revamped. Linux and MySQL will almost certainly remain, though.
For your requirement, XSL-FO might just do the trick. It is much cleaner to produce the pdf's directly from the data, then going the cumbersome html path, unless you need to display the html as well, then you might consider converting from html to pdf, but it will always be messy.
You can get xml results from mysql quite easily (mysql --xml) and then you write one (or several) xsl-fo stylesheet for the data. then, you cannot only produce pdfs, but also postscript files or rtf's with some processors.
XSL-FO has its limitations tho, but for your situation, it should suffice.
I admit, the learning curve can be steep, and maintaining xslt-stylesheets can get very tiring, but as you start knowing more about it, you end up writing less code.
another possibility is to do the whole thing in e.g. java or c# - send select statements and loop the results and iteratively build the pdf using a library like iText.
You could try JODReports or Docmosis as less-code intensive options. You supply Word or OpenOffice Writer documents to act as templates and use these engines to manipulate/populate the templates then spit out the documents in the format(s) you require. This may mean your existing Word-templates can be used directly which should save you some effort/time.
iText is another library that will let you build and pump out PDFs from code. It's pretty good.
If you cloud use ASP.NET for web you can use free ReportViewer library and designer for automated of publishing PDF-s.
Here is some references:
http://gotreportviewer.com
http://weblogs.asp.net/srkirkland/archive/2007/10/29/exporting-a-sql-server-reporting-services-2005-report-directly-to-pdf-or-excel.aspx
If you're OK using .NET and C#, you could use DotPdf from Atalasoft (obligatory disclaimer: I work for Atalasoft and wrote most of DotPdf). The Generating namespace is geared for exactly what you're trying to do: automate report generation. From the very basics, you could just create docs directly with the toolkit or you can create template documents that have unpopulated text fields that you can reload and fill later (see here and here for examples).
Currently I am working on a project for a client that compares the difference between two XML files, generates an XML that lists the differences (i.e. if a part in an inventory was <Added>, <Deleted>, or <Modified>) and displays a report in HTML.
I have three transforms that basically transform large vendor-specific XML files to simple generic XML files (schema defined). These generic XML files are then transformed into one generic XML file that shows the differences and then that is transformed to a report.html for display for the user.
Presently for testing, I invoke a .bat file to run all three transforms (using Saxon8.jar). My question is, is it possible to put these transforms on a server and create a HTML page with a one-click action that will let the user upload the vendor-specific XML files, transform them, and display the generated HTML file to the user?
You haven't specified whether you'll be using php, java or ASP.NET, however, the functionality you're looking for is possible in all three cases. Your backend web app should have the necesssary mechanism to accept the file uploaded by the user, save it in some work folder, run the necessary transformation using your chosen language, Jave, C#, php etc. and then write back the HTML.
Is it possible? Yes.
To do it you'd typically use some server-side technology (php, ruby, java) to perform the transforms.
But browser-side XSLT is possible, too.
Apache Cocoon is a powerful XML processing engine.
If you're just doing this one job, then coding a Java servlet to do it is not too difficult. If you're doing lots of similar things, a framework like Cocoon or Orbeon will save you effort in the long run.
I'm writing an app that, at its heart, uses a hierarchical tree of nodes
in XML, it looks like this:
<node>
<name>Node1</name>
<Attribute1>Something</Attribute1>
<Attribute2>SomethingElse</Attribute2>
<child>Node2</child>
<child>Node4</child>
<child>Node7</child>
</node>
And so on (all child elements must refer to an existing node, though the node inquestion doesnt have to precede the first reference to it)
For a simple structure like this is there a simple tool to generate a html page that will allow a user to enter Nodes and dynamically update a server-side xml file?
Im basically writing a tool that will use such a file, but the people who's job it is to create the file arent especially techno-literate, so creating the XML by hand is a no-no.
I could hand-crank one fairly quickly, but if I can get a tool to do it, even better (especially as the format may change in future)....
Xopus is a browser based XML editor that you could use for this. It is designed for the non techno-literate people out there.
Disclaimer: I work at Xopus.
I am pretty sure there is nothing that will do that for you automagically and you'll need to write that bit yourself.
Your options are to create a web based interface to do it, using HTML POST and writing the output to a file or database (then reloading it on submission) or something more advance with Javascript (e.g. that could do it dynamically with AJAX).
You can't do it in HTML alone - either way you'd need something to handle outputting the existing data and accepting HTTP POST requests, but you don't mention what language or platform you are using to write this. Being clear on that will help people suggest appropriate solutions.
You might want to rethink the XML structure ... Elements called "attribute{anything}" are ill advised (as are elements named in the convention foo1, foo2, (etc)). The whole <child>Node2</child> thing doesn't seem like a good way to go either. I suggest posting an actual example of the XML in question.
From what you've said, it sounds like there is no specific need for it to be in XML at all. Not that XML is bad (it isn't) but if putting it in an SQL database is a valid option and you have one of those anyway (e.g. your using a LAMP stack) then that's something to consider.
Would an XML editor like http://www.oxygenxml.com/ suffice? I don't know of any html web ones unless you write one yourself and use AJAX to send the data. At least an XML editor can generate a form that you can use to create and edit XML documents. Microsoft do infopath as well - which is actually designed more for questionaires but might do what you need, if the non-tech people would prefer something more office like.
If I have some forms in Extensible Forms Description Language (XFDL) format, is there a good way render them as HTML? Someone hasn't been kind enough to create an free XSLT file for doing this transformation, have they? What might my other options me?
There will be a significant amount of work required if you are intending to render in html as well as reproduce any "logic" (via conversion to javascript) that may be inherent in the XFDL form, such as XFDL computes or XPath functions.
There is a product by IBM called Lotus Forms Server that includes a component called Webform Server that renders XFDL in html, yet also runs all of the application logic that may be embedded in the form by making ajax calls back to the server as needed (and occasionally round-tripping if necessary).
Doing it yourself. Sorry, learning XSLT could be an interesting experience and is best left to be done yourself.