A common requirement is that specific information needs to be made available as a file or printout. A normal Internet page is
generally inappropriate for this, as many format definitions (paper size, etc.) are simply unavailable.
Since, however, the options for designing printable documents should be as comprehensive as possible,
there is really only one group of software products able to cover most requirements: text processing systems.
Starting with Intrexx 7.0, a mechanism is available that allows a template for OpenOffice to be
created based on a view page in the Application Designer. This template contains all elements (view fields, tables,
static text, images, and so on) in the Intrexx page. An attempt is made to place the elements corresponding to how they are defined on the
Intrexx page, although this cannot be guaranteed in all circumstances. For report generation, the text processing programs described in the
following can be used.
OpenOffice
OpenOffice is an open source text processing program that can be used without paying licensing fees.
Its use is little different from Microsoft’s Office products.
The template created from an application page can be designed, formatted, and provided with headers and footers using all
possibilities for text processing. Of course, it can also access data from an Intrexx application.
The data is dynamically inserted in the document – text fields are then placed in the template as placeholders.
Tables can also be displayed. In this case, the table is created using Velocity markup. When a page break occurs, you can define whether a header line repeats.
The placeholders within the template have the system name from the application by default. Since these names are normally
not very expressive, as well as normally being relatively long, it can be difficult to keep an overview within a template. To counteract this, Intrexx provides the ability to change the names in a dialog box.
iText
The iText open source text processor is included with an installation of Intrexx. iText can be preset
in the portal properties.
iText can be used to generate simple reports without tables or images, but this text processing program is not recommended for
more complex report outputs.
The completed document can be opened directly from the browser via a new button action. You can define whether the document should be opened in its original format (such as *.odt) or as a PDF.
The Process Manager contains the Generate Report action. This action generates the document (PDF or ODT file), which can then be saved directly to a data record.
Document generation must first be activated for an arbitrary appropriate view page. You can use view pages that only show one data record, or view pages that contain tables or charts.
Buttons on the Intrexx view page will not be added to the template, and will therefore not be shown in the completed document or PDF.
Open the properties dialog box for the view page and switch to the Documents tab.
Here you see an example from an Intrexx view page and the implementation of the template through a report generation in OpenOffice.
You can set presets for the layout of the templates in the portal properties.
For users to be able to resolve a document generation, you require a button with the create document action.
