Hi Piotr, and others, The previous 3 postings have been about how to create a DP XML file, and how to use it with Word 2003 for an XML "mail merge" type application.
In the first part, we used Word to open up the DPNews.doc file, and how to apply a transformation within Word to generate the new document. The second part showed how to convert the structure of theXML file to a Schema which could be used by Word to create a templae document, the third posting showed how to creata a Template dcument with Word. Once you have created a template document, it is not essential to use Word to create new documents based on this template. It is possible to use other programs (some free) to generate the merged Word 2003 and document, into an ordinary documents that an everyday Word users could open without having any understanding of how it was created. To them it is a native Word document. There are many programs that can perform XSLT transformations. Word of course was one of them, but also you can use many applications, including say the free WMHelp XMLPad I used to create the DTD and Schema files in my second posting. There are many other such as XMLSpy, Oxygen, but my favourite is an open source commandline utility xsltproc.exe. It is available for both the Linux/Unix or Windows operating systems. You can find details and documentation for it at http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/xsltproc2.html and download the Windows version from http://www.zlatkovic.com/pub/libxml/libxslt-1.1.23+.win32.zip Going back to the DPNews.doc file created by DP in the first posting, if you wanted to create the final native (XML) Word 2003 document you would simply use the command: xsltproc -o Newfile.doc DPNews.doc and it would create the file NewFile.doc which could be directly opened by Word without it ever being obvious that it waqs not created in Word. If you preferred you could leave the new file with the extension XML instead of DOC. It is likely that on a Windows platform that it would be correctly opened by Word as there is a processing instruction in the XML file that tell the operating system that it is a Word file. The above command would use the associated XSLT sheet which was specified in the DP XML file. If you wanted to use a different XSLT template you could override the default by using the command xsltproc -o Newfile.doc DPNews.xsl DPNews.doc Some really cool things with this is that, if you use the STDOUT facility from the new DP2.6Y you could transform a file like this: dp myapp.str /EI=mylog.log | xsltproc (with or without the -o NewFile.doc) and it would take the output directly from DP and pipe it to the XSLT processing utility and either save the results to a new file or send the output to STDOUT. This means for example that you could from a webserver merge the data with a templkate and deliver the result as a file download to the user's browser. Alol without ever having to have used Word to generate the document, note of course you need Word to create the template, and you need Word (or the free Word Viewer) to view the final document. To make it a file download rather than be read as a webpage all that is needed to do this is to add the appropriate MIME header before the document is output ie Content-disposition: attachment; filename=defaultfilename.doc If you have created your own DPNewsletter, you have probably found that embedded line breaks in a memo field were ignored when you merged them with Word, whereas in my original example the linebreaks appeared. This is because I had edited the DPNews.xsl template file and added another template rule: <xsl:template match="ns0:br"> <w:br/> </xsl:template> The "ns0:" is a namespace prefix that Word added to the document (and it might be different values so watch out). This rule ways that when you encounter a <br /> in the DP X<ML file, replace it in the word document with <w:br /> which is the Word 2003 instruction for a line break. It would be possible to add rules to cover the bold, underlined or italic however that is not quite so easy and I wanted to make the example as quickly as possible so I omitted it. My example only output a single customer's newsletter. If I wanted to create a number of customers' newsletters in one merge it would have been possible however I would have probably had to hand tune Word XSLT file. Instead of just having to apply the root "dpnews" element to the whole document I would have had to apply the "customer" element to the whole document as well. This would have meant that within the document my context would have been set at the "customer" level so the "article" elements would not have been so obvious. I would have had to had tune the XPath, so from within the "customer" content I would have had to specify the XPath as either "/dpnews/article" or perhaps "../article" (XPath's really do behave a lot like directory paths) I hope this gives an insignt into merging DP and Word. Regards Brian
_______________________________________________ Dataperf mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dataperfect.nl/mailman/listinfo/dataperf
