On 14.01.2003 04:51:13 VipinJ wrote:
>
> >But I think you're mixing things here. You're talking about a HTML
> >preview and you're talking about Excel. Is that linked together
> somehow?
> >What are trying to accomplish?
>
> The clients need the same report in 3 formats :
> PDF
> HTML
> Excel
>
> We are doing an MIS for a leading airline.
> There are around 80 reports.
> So what we are trying to do is to reuse the same FOP code to generate
> HTML and Excel reports.
>
> If this is not successful, we will have to add 80+80=160 new files.
> :-))
I know how you must feel with this prospect. Roberto Calero is right
about his observations in general, but I'd like to add a few points:
- Every report you generate also has to be in Excel format. I guess that
means that every report is primarily a table of data. So all 80
reports are probably more or less the same to a certain degree. What
you could try is to find a common denominator on the data you have to
generate the report. What I want to say is this: If you can come up
with a common XML format (not XSL:FO, HTML or something like that,
your own XML format) in which you can map every or most of your 80
reports, then you might be in a position where you only have to write
only one single XSLT for each output format (HTML, XSL-FO and
CSV/Excel). I guess you already have to do a lot of copy/paste when
you create your XSLT if you haven't sorted out a common stylesheet
library already.
MIS report data (XML)
+---+---> XSLT ---> HTML
+---> XSLT ---> CSV (alternative 1)
+---> XSLT ---> Gnumeric XML ---> Cocoon/POI ---> XLS
� (alternative 2)
+---> XSLT ---> XSL-FO ---> FOP ---> PDF
See here for the Cocoon/POI stuff:
http://xml.apache.org/cocoon/userdocs/serializers/xls-serializer.html
- You seem to be wanting to convert XSL-FO to Excel. I don't think this
is a good idea. XSL-FO is made to define a page layout, not to
generate a spreadsheet document. That's simply not what it was made
for. It's better to do this before you get to XSL-FO like I suggest in
the point above.
> So before giving them the estimate, we would like to see how much of
> work is left
>
> That is the intention.
I hope this helps along the way.
Jeremias Maerki
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