Report designer

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Hi, I got a request to add a report designer to my application. The standard document template's are not sufficient because depending on the occasion the user wants to use (has to use) another format. And as nobody can predict the formats I have to offer some flexibility. Do you have experience with creating or embedding a report designer in Mendix? I am looking at XSL:FO and http://www.java4less.com/fopdesigner/fodesigner.php, but is this the right approach? I look forward to hear your experience in this matter. Regards, Paul
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It would be a fairly trivial feature to also offer export of XSL-FO as a generated document, as this is the base format we also use for our documents. Perhaps you can request this.

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Thank you for all your suggestions.

In the meantime I evaluated a number of products that can be divided in two technologies. One is a group of XSL:FO editors and the other looks like mail merge. After discussing these options with their pros and cons with a selected group of our customers I decided to go for mail merge: no need for an additional designer client because Word and in some cases OpenOffice/LibreOffice is the designer tool and Word is a tool most people know so a short learning curve.

I found two companies that provide a suitable product:

  • Aspose: they offer a lot of products to generate documents but they lack features for my purpose (for example horizontal filling of a table like a template grid); see http://www.aspose.com/
  • DocMosis: a lot of features specifically for converting Word/Writer documents with JSON data to PDF/DOC and they offer this even as a service (REST); see https://www.docmosis.com/

I selected the latter (DocMosis Cloud) and got it up and running successfully with help from their tremendous support team. We are going to move all our Mx DocumentTemplates to this technology, because it allows our customers to create their own report designs within the limits of the data structure that we provide.

Regards, Paul

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Hi Paul,

As demonstrated in the last patner meet-up, as Appronto, we created a module around Aspose and have created a seamless integration between Aspose and Mendix integrated with Mendix model reflection.

I see you already selected the other solution. But if you're still interested please contact us.

Regards, Herbert

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