I just inherited another application, currently written in VBA, that needs
to be integrated into the rest of my CF web site. Am looking for ideas on a
couple of techniques.
The application is used to gather information from a salesperson about the
deal that they are pursuing, and then generates the appropriate customer
documents (statements of work, etc), that contain the correct paragraphs and
supporting details, based on what the salesperson entered. For instance, if
the salesperson says that this is a server management deal, for 15 servers,
then the SOW will be specific to server management, and there will be
sections that contain information on those 15 servers. If it were a network
support deal, there would be information on routers, etc.
The current app is in VBA, with the data in an Access database. VBA
interacts with MS Word to create the documents. The application actually
runs on the client PC, with the Access database on a network drive.
What would be a good solution in CF? Interacting with Word in the
background seems to be harder in a server based environment than when it is
on the user's client PC. What about Using Acrobat forms: generating an
Acrobat FDF file from CF, and letting Acrobat do the merge? One of the
variables seems to be the fact that some of the content will vary from one
type of deal to the next, but a good bit of it is the same. Also, there is
the fact that the tables of hardware information that need to be generated
will vary in size - can Acrobat Forms handle that?
If the printing capabilities of HTML were a little further along, I'd be
thinking of simply generating HTML docs, but things like pagination,
indexing, etc., are currently a pain to handle. I do have the flexibility of
limiting users to only using IE.
One of the shortcomings of the current app is that it generates Word docs,
which are modifiable. One of the ideas for the new app is to generate PDF
files as output. Are there any background PDF generation tools? I looked
in the developer's exchange, and saw some PDF tools, but nothing along this
line.
Thanks for the help!
-reed
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