The goal is to design beautiful templates in InDesign, which are then being used to programmatically generate printable PDFs within a special application connected to a database, so I can fill data from the database into the templates.
I have no idea how to approach this. I found a lot of HTML to PDF conversion related info, but that approach has its limitations.
Did anybody face the same question and might point me in the right direction?
Yes, the scenario you described can be fully handled by InDesign Scripting using ExtendScript. I have done this in the past several times and it works quite well. The key in my opinion is to have a designer prepare the file for you as finished as possible and make good use of the built in InDesign automations. That means they will do the layout, but also set up all the paragraph styles, character styles, object styles and possibly grep styles as well as master spreads for each different page.
Then the job of the script that you run will mostly be to fill in the contents and to assign the mentioned styles and master spread as needed. If everything is set up properly, most of the layout should fall into place automatically.
Also, contrary to the comments to your question, I don't think you need InDesign server for that. Especially if you run everything locally anyways.
Related
I work on Labware LIMS, which has both configuration, and customization via its own programming language and internal code editor, and stores this customization code in database records. (Note, not the source code of the actual application itself, just the customization code a.k.a. LIMS Basic.) Almost everything in LIMS is stored in the database.
We want to investigate the possibility of using source control to protect this code but we don't know much more than the theory of using something like Git. (I have worked as a junior QA and used git but not as a dev and my knowledge is limited!)
Of particular use would be the merging tools, as currently we have to manually merge code in a text editor, if we even notice there is a conflict (checking content between dev and live is time consuming and involves using multiple tools, some of which are 3rd party tools we have developed ourselves, which are hit and miss. I personally find it easiest to cut and paste into a text file and then use Beyond Compare.
There is no notification that the code is different when moving it from dev to live (no deployment as such, you just import an xml file) so we often have things going live that someone was working on unbeknownst to each other. I.e. dev 1 is working on the code in object 1, dev 2 gets a ticket to make a change to object 1, does so and puts their change Live, whatever dev 1 was doing is now also Live in whatever state it was in. (Because we don't always have time to thoroughly check what state each object is in between up to 3 different databases.)
Is it possible to use source control just on the code within the database, but not necessarily the database itself? (We have backups and such for that but its easy for some aspects of the system to get overwritten by multiple devs working on overlapping areas at the same time.)
If anyone reading this has any specific knowledge of LW LIMS, we are referring to the Subroutines mostly, we have versioned Analyses which stands in for source control for the moment and is somewhat effective but no way to control who is doing what on the subroutines other than a comment log at the top. I have tried to find any information on how other teams source control their code in LIMS but to no avail.
The structure of one of these tables can range from as simple as the code just existing in one field as a straight text dump with a few other fields such as changed_on, changed_by and name (Subroutines), or more complex with code relating to one record being sprinkled around in multiple rows on another table entirely (Analyses) but even if it could just deal with the simple scenario to start with that would be great!
TL;DR: Could the contents of the Code field in a database record be treated like a regular code object in other dev environments somehow and source controlled using Git? (And is anyone willing to explain it simply for me to follow?)
As you need to version control table fields of subroutine, but LW LIMS doesn’t have the IDE for version control (such as git, svn etc). So the direct answer is no.
If you really want to do version control for the codes in database, you can create a git repository and only put the codes in git repository. when a file has updated, you can commit & push the changes. And it’s easy to compare the difference between versions.
More detail about git, you can refer git book.
LabWare LIMS has a number of options for version control. You COULD version the Subroutine table by adding a SUBROUTINE.VERSION field to the table, this works the same way as other versioned tables in LabWare where it asks you if you would like to create a new version of the object before saving. There are a few customers I work with that have done this.
Alternatively, (and possibly our more recommended method prior to LEM) there is the Snapshot capability where the system automatically takes a "snapshot" of objects as they are saved - when viewing these you have the ability to view them side by side in a comparison dialogue - it will show < or > for lines which are different.
Another approach is, if you have auditing turned on you are able to view the audit history for changes to specific objects - this includes subroutines.
One other approach is to use configuration packages - this has the ability to record version AND build numbers. Though individual subroutines is probably a bit too granular for it's intended design.
Lastly, since this question was originally posted we have developed a product called LabWare Environment Manager (LEM) which has some good change control functionality built-in.
For more information on the suggestions above, please have a look at the LabWare Technical manual for the version you are on. We also have a mailing list for questions like this to be posted. You might find an answer there. If you have access to our Support webpage you're able to search previous questions that have been asked. I'd also suggest that you get in touch with your Account Manager at LabWare who can help you answer some of your questions.
HTH
I want to know what is the best and common way to write SDK blog in drupal.
Write the blog directly to new content type in drupal.
Write and design the blogs in word document (or something similar), and later, with process (module that I will write) load all the docs into content type.
Other.
Your best bet is to enter your blog entries directly into Drupal -- like you said into whatever content type you're using for your blogs! If that's an option you (or whoever the blog author(s) may be) are willing to do, better get used to it at the beginning.
There are several problems you may run into if you're choosing to create your content outside of Drupal and pasting it in after the fact. At the minimum I can now think of the following two:
Folks can run into formatting issues when Word styles are copied and pasted into the Drupal editor of your choice (even though there are 'Paste from Word' options for some of the editors). Especially if there are multiple authors and some adhere to proper copying and pasting, while others don't, you can end up with posts that have different font sizes, font styles, etc and that can make the site look less professional. I'd suggest always creating the content within the Drupal editor, regardless of the scenario. However, that is particularly true when there are multiple authors creating content outside the Drupal editor (for example in Word) and pasting it in after the fact. With multiple folks, training and adherence to best practices can become more of an issue. To see formatting problems, give it a test yourself: create some fancy, styled content in Word (not just plain paragraphs or it won't really be that interesting) and paste it into CKEditor or whatever else you're using. Then inspect the html code that results using the 'Source' button on the editor. Don't use 'Paste from Word' option that usually helps.
If you have images in your posts, you won't be able to just copy and paste them into the Drupal editor from Word... you'd still have to upload the image and insert it into the post the Drupal way
So, rather than creating the content once, copying and pasting it and potentially having to do a ton of clean-up after the fact, just get used to creating it in Drupal!
Then -- as your blog grows and you potentially add to it (additional fields, additional features), you'll be able to more fully take advantage of your Drupal environment if your workflow doesn't include an outside program like Word in it!!
I'm trying to migrate all "content" pages on a website to DNN5 Pro.
So I just created all the pages in DNN, added HTML module to the ContentPane and copied and pasted the HTML content from old pages.
The problem is that most of the pages have bits of classic asp code which do some minor server-side tasks - for example, populate tables with prices fetched from DB, pre-select user's country based on his IP address, do some basic dates calculations, etc.
Obviously, this code won't work in DNN.
If I had to migrate to PHP, I'd just rewrite these bits of code from classic ASP to PHP, then assign values from PHP to smarty and then would use them in templates.
But as DNN has a completely different architecture, I can't see how similar approach can be used.
Token replacement feature in HTML module looks like what I need, but it allows to "map" only tokens provided by DNN.
So, maybe anyone had similar issue with DNN and/or knows how this should be done.
It seems like you are attempting to subvert the entire point of DotNetNuke. While certainly there are a variety of hacky ways you could try to make this work just like the php site, it's a terrible idea to do so.
Instead, you need to evaluate each of the dynamic sections of the php site and find or create a DotNetNuke module that will replicate that functionality.
To make the initial conversion quicker, you can build modules you create using simple ASP style inline scripting but you should definitely use existing modules for things like displaying data in a grid.
You could write code directly in your skin file. Do some logic like:
<%If PortalSettings.ActiveTab.TabID = 33 Then
//code here of what you want
End If%>
Where 33 is the page id for the page you want to run custom code on. There are other ways to do this like creating skin objects, or creating custom modules, but this is probably the easiest thing to do. Just write code directly in you skin. Or make a copy of your skin for each page you need to do custom code for... again, more elegant ways but this will get'er done.
This follows on from this question where I was getting a few answers assuming I was using files for storing my HTML templates.
Before recently I've always saved 'compiled' templates as html files in a directory (above the root). My templates usually have two types of variable - 'static' variables which are not replaced on every usage but are used across the site - basically for ease of maintenanceif I decide to change the site name for example; and dynamic vars that change on every page load.
I always used to save these as files on the server - but my friend pointed out something I'd overlooked: why have 5-10 filesystem calls when you can have one database call?
What I want to know is which is more efficient? Calling several HTML files from the system or calling several rows of templates from the database (in one query/call).
Don't Store Editable HTML In the database
Seriously, because the maintenance overhead for mere changes becomes exhaustive once you realise you can no longer just pop open a text editor.
I worked on many projects which had HTML content in the database, and it was a constant nightmare of "find that row the content is on" and I really would liked to have shot the person whom made it.
Also, DON'T PREMATURELY OPTIMISE . If you find it a problem thats slowing the project down, then change it. Because making the code exhaustively less maintainable to save a millisecond. But design the code well enough that should you need to change where the content comes from later it should be easy to do.
Surely that can be resolved by having
a suitable web interface for editing
the templates?
Erm, really not, unless you're only trying to compete with notepad. Syntax highlighting and all the other full host of features you can get in a standard editor just make your developers suicidal when they find themselves editing web pages by hacking at an undersized text area with awful white on black ( not to mention the extra fun you get with having to worry about entity encoding etc, for instance, try editing html with in a text area where the html content contains a text area element! )
On FileIO While File IO can be a bottleneck, keep in mind that if you have a proper linux install, and plenty of memory, a handy thing known as "disk-cache" takes effect, which in effect, keeps files used in memory, so file IO becomes mere memcpy.
On the contrary, in real stress tests on any of the code I have used, the biggest slowdowns have been in the database!, primarily the nice slow CONNECT string, query parse time, extra php<->mysql interactions. You're not really looking at gaining anything. Filesystem lookup is close to database index lookup, and you don't have any unknowns other than "you need to stream it from a disk", no table locking stuff to worry about!
You should probably try something like a caching library, X-Cache comes highly recommended, thats more likely to give you visible performance gains.
I pretty much agree with the gist of Kent Fredric's answer. But, if you really want to know, which is more efficient/faster, you cannot reasonably expect to get the answer here. If you want that answer, there is only one way to get it: profile the application both ways.
I'm doing a personal, just for fun, project that is using screen scraping to give me a System Tray notification in case another line on an HTML table is added, modified or deleted.
Having done this before I thought: well let's go with the regular expression thing and that's it, but being a curious person, made me think that there could be something else out there that could have another paradigm but be as simple to use.
I know about DOM and X-Path and all the xml'ish approaches. I'm looking for something outside the box, something that can even be defined in a set of rules so you can make a plugin system to aggregate various sites.
See Options for HTML Scraping
Here's an idea: assuming your main use case is getting a notification whenever an HTML file changes, why not use a standard diff tool and then loop through the changed lines, applying your rules?
Also, if this is a situation where you have access to the server and the files you're watching, you might be able to put everything under source control with CVS (or similar) and just watch for commits. If you want to use this approach for random sites on the web, just write a script that periodically downloads the html for the appropriate URLs and then commits it to source control and watch the diffs.
Not very practical, but outside the box.
If you can convert the source into valid XHTML/XML using something like SgmlReader or HtmlTidy then you could use XSLT. Simply create a XSL template for each site you wish to scrape.