Generate PDF files with dynamic info from Progress DB...

[tbaxter11]

Hi All!... I was wondering if anyone out there can suggest any products
which you have FIRST HAND knowledge about (and hands-on
experience with) for generating PDF files containing dynamic information
filled in from a Progress database query... a nice windows-type
front-end "wizard", or drag and drop capabilities would be nice when
designing a PDF's layout, while using this tool.
thanks,
Terry Baxter

 

[Marian EDU]

We use one of the Java report engines available - Birt, Jasper Reports, Pentaho - which all have a easy to use WYSIWYG graphical report designer and are able to generate reports in any of the most common document formats out there: PDF, Word, Excel...

Data can be fetched either through regular Open Edge JDBC driver (with SQL queries run directly on the database tables, uses SQL engine) or for a layered application one might get the data from the business logic layer instead... for that we have our own JDBC driver implementation that allows to call pure Open Edge ABL business logic procedures to reuse the application BL, or might even accept plain ABL FOR-EACH syntax if you don't want to bother with the SQL

http://www.ganimede.ro/cms/products/abl-jdbc/

If you are looking into integrating that Java reporting engines inside Open Edge environment then you can check out the report engine integration module, it also provide some template based dynamic report generation for plain tabular reports that doesn't justify having a design on their own...

http://www.ganimede.ro/cms/products/abl-report/

 

[tamhas]

http://www.oehive.org/pdfinclude
http://www.oehive.org/project/libooxml

 

[Marian EDU]

yeah, seems to be the norm in progress world to not leave the comfort of our dear ABL even if it's definitively not up for the job

for a somehow less advanced designer but with a great 'transformation' engine you might look into Apache's FOP (http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/) + FO Designer (http://www.java4less.com/fopdesigner/fodesigner.php)... of course using a designer might not be as fun as going through an API learning experience

 

[tbaxter11]

Thank-you, Marian... I'll look into these.
regards,
Terry Baxter

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

Hi Terry,

Chris Longo from BravePoint gave a talk at Revolution on using BIRT with ABL to produce documents (Word, Excel, PDF). You can get a recording here. Alternatively, for a quick 'n dirty solution you could just generate Word documents via COM automation and do a save-as to PDF format.