Hi Brian, It seems to be a good solution for me. Thank you for these guidelines on the way I have to go.
Now, what I need is to have more understanding / learn XML-XLST to be able to differently format (size, appearance) each field imported/merged from DP. One thing is still unclear for me: I'm using Windows XP Pro with CP=852 to have our national characters properly entered & displayed in Windows. These characters are properly entered, displayed & sorted in DP2.6x. In your example DP2.6Y Report generates file DPNEWS.DOC. I've entered some records with national characters (properly entered & displayed in DP2.6Y). After opening the file in MS Word national characters are distorted. To experiment, I've entered some national characters into DPNEWS.DOC by the Notepad (properly entered & displayed in Notepad). After opening the file in MS Word I can see these 'Notepad_entered' characters correctly. Is distortion was made by DP2.6Y? MEIRTE Danny was writing something similiar about using multilingual codes. Is there any bypass to have DP2.6Y with national characters? If not, I'll write MS Word macro to replace what was distorted. Any suggestion? Have a good day, Piotr Barancewicz 2008/6/17, Brian Hancock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 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
