Hi CF'ers, This is a little long-winded and a little off topic, but any comments will be greatly appreciated. This is basically my daily report to my now disgruntled client ... who wants to see progress... at any cost. For my part, this is a biggole sanity check! ;)
First, a little background information: This is a re-do of a Crystal Report that was accepted by the client last February (while I was on vacation... aahhh to be young again). Nearly 6 weeks passed before anyone (myself included ... shame on me) noticed that the 'EDITABLE' ms-word doc created by Crystal is not actually editable at all... it looks editable, smells editable, etc. but Crystal's export DLL's wrap every page into a fixed-size frame which does not flow... not to mention headers/footers get their own frames which get stepped on, etc... OK - 'nuff of that... and out with Crystal Reports. The document must be editable (DOC or RTF). PDF is 100% out of the question. Formatting of the document must be precise (I've already tried and dismissed various HTML-2-RTF conversion utilities for lack of formatting power...) Next, the document must be generated on the server (as a part of a larger CF application). Therefore, there will be no need for a client setup program, macros to install/run or any need to support the variety of desktop configurations in the field. Here's a three-tiered approach we will take to make the document generate from the web server: 1 - Run a copy of MS Word with an "auto-execute" macro on the server and insert the variable data (proposal fields in tailored training) into a Word template. This macro (template file) will be fed the active proposal data from either a standard ODBC (Open DataBase Connector) or from a delimited text file written to disk. Two potential problems here: 1) Performance & stability ... 2) Actually getting the data into Word 'on the fly' (this is currently an unknown). However, I have successfully tested a Cold Fusion provides functions which will launch an external application. If this works, no need to move onto tier-two... 2 - Write a stand-alone Visual Basic application (compiled) that essentially does the same thing described above. The major difference is that instead of using a template file to hold the boilerplate text, the Proposal document will be 'hard-wired' inside of the VB application. I will call this VB application using Cold Fusion, as mentioned above. And I will use standard ODBC drivers to pull the data directly from the database. I will need to feed this stand-alone VB program a parameter value to indicate which Proposal ID to use when searching the Access database. Again, if for whatever reason this approach fails, I will advance to tier number three... 3 - Write a set of Microsoft COM (Component Object Model) automation components to accomplish the goal of generating an editable proposal from the server on-the-fly. These will be written in Visual Basic. These automation objects will be compiled components very similar to the stand-alone VB application described in tier two. The primary difference is these components will be running as web services and thus will provide the greatest performance & stability. The downside is that this the most complex approach. The upside is that this is the most powerful & flexible approach. In the final analysis, we may not need this 'power & flexiblity', but then again, this may be the only approach that gets the job done. [note that I have someone to help with COM creation... if it comes to that] Thanks all, Mike ______________________________________________________________________ Signup for the Fusion Authority news alert and keep up with the latest news in ColdFusion and related topics. http://www.fusionauthority.com/signup.cfm FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
