Background

You can create reports using OpenDocument documents as templates. This functionality takes an OpenDocument document, processes it, adds data from a ViewModel, and outputs the resulting document file.

Ways to Retrieve the Template

The templates can be accessed in several different ways:

1. From the database in BLOB attribute in a modeled class
2. From a URL (for example, a document server)
3. From the local filesystem

The ViewModel providing the report data also has attributes with specific names providing information to the reporting functionality.

Attribute name	Attribute should evaluate to	Value type and content
TemplateUrl	The URL or local filename	String with for example http://www.mdriven.net/templates/report.odt or for prototyping c:\\temp\\mytemplate.odt
TemplateBlob	A class attribute containing the template	Blob with an uploaded document template, value is expected to be Base64Encoded
TemplateIsHtml	True or False signaling how the template should be handled	Boolean, True, or False
ReportFileName	Filename to be used when opening the generated document
ReportDirectoryName	Directoryname that will be used if the document is saved before opening it	This is passed along with the IOpenDocumentService and can be used by implementors to structure documents in zip files or output directories

Methods

Depending on your input format, you can use either of these two functions:

opendocumentreportasblob

Takes an array of bytes as input and output.

ResultAsBlob := self.opendocumentreportasblob(ReportRoot.ViewModels.ReportingViewmodel)

opendocumentreportshow

Does the same as opendocumentreportasblob above, but opens the resulting HTML in the browser.

self.opendocumentreportshow(ReportRoot.ViewModels.ReportingViewmodel)

Document Formats

OpenDocument Text - ODT

Tips when editing "open document text" odt files in MS Word:

• Any font changes (even if invisible) will interfere with MDriven's detection of what to replace in your document. If you encounter this, copy the text (including %) and paste it as "plain text", replacing the previous text.
• Line breaks will interfere with MDriven's detection of what to replace in your document. Use Word's text section settings and select "no line breaks" to avoid these problems.

OpenDocument sheets - ODS

OpenDocument Excels - ODS document has issues with using data as numbers if you do not explicitly say that it is a number.

The problem is that our data tags like %Something% that corresponds to ViewModelColumns are interpreted as text by Excel - so our template will always believe that every cell filled with data is text.

To help you avoid this, we have introduced this naming conversion:

ViewModelColumn name ending with	Interpreted by report logic as	Data must
float	excel value-type float	pass decimal.TryParse
percentage	excel value-type percentage and excel value = sent in value /100	end with a % and data before % must pass decimal.TryParse

Use these naming suffixes in ViewModels that constitute reports for Excel in order to get Excel to understand that the value in an Excel cell should be interpreted as a float or percentage - default will be interpreted as String.

HTML and XML Documents

You can also use HTML templates. If the template used ends with .htm or .html, the logic expects a well-formed HTML document.

See HtmlReport for more information.

Information About Available Tags (Meta Data)

When creating OpenDocument documents, consider using the tag %meta% in your document to get the exact tag list for your document.

Copy the tag name including the percent signs from the generated meta tag information (preferably without style). The %meta% must be the first string in the element in order to be recognized - it is also case-sensitive.

If you type or edit a part of the tag name, your editor might insert invisible control information that interfere with the merging.

Notes

2020-04-06: Please also note that we have seen some issues with corrupt downloads when the ods template is created in OpenOffice 4.1.X. If the template is created in Excel, check that the document is downloaded properly.

Examples

See Microsoft Office and OpenDocument as a Report generator for an example.