Most Powerful Open Source ERP

OOoTemplate Roadmap

On the one hand, OOoTemplate supports enough features to produce about any kind of complex report. On the other hand, ODT and ODS style are capapable of rendering any ERP5 Form or ERP5 Report into ODF text or spreadsheet.
  • Last Update:2016-05-16
  • Version:001
  • Language:en

On the one hand, OOoTemplate supports enough features to produce about any kind of complex report. On the other hand, ODT and ODS style are capapable of rendering any ERP5 Form or ERP5 Report into ODF text or spreadsheet.

Table of Contents

Current Status

The current features are of OOoTemplate are:

  • dynamic content: the content.xml part is generated like a page template;
  • embeddable content: part of the content can be embedded from another OOoTemplate. It is therefore possible to render composite reports (ex. a Draw document which displays a spreadhsheets next to a chart next to styled text);
  • dynamic stylesheet: the stylesheet can be a callable and thus can depend on the context of the report in any possible way. This can be selecting a static file from a script or even rendering some page template to include it as the stle.xml element of a styleshee file.

The current features of ODT and ODS style are:

  • render an ERP5 Form as ODT (ODS)
  • ender an ERP5 Report as ODT (ODS)

Future

Easier Dynamic Stylesheets

The dynamic stylesheet feature of OOo Template could be made easier to use if the stylesheet which was provided was it self an OOo Template (or a kind of) which would make the style.xml part dynamic instead of the content.xml.

solution 1 add a new skin type 'OOo Template Stylesheet' which is the same as OOo Template but makes style.xml dynamic instead of content.xml

solution 2 make OOo Template folderish and allow the inclusion of page templates for the different parts of the ODF file

solution 3 combination of 1 and 2

solution 4 solution 3 + make any part dynamic (ex. metadata, author information, etc.)

In all solutions, we split the style (shared by many reports) from the report (content only).

Integration with ERP5 Forms

The easiest way to define a Report in ERP5 is to use ERP5 Form and ERP5 Report objects. It should actually be the only way because it is much higher level, more modular, maintainble, reusable and generic. However, certain kinds of reports can not be made this way and will never be made this way, because they are too dynamic and require too much layout details. Only the low level approach of OOo Template (or PDF Template) can meet the requirements.

However, it is possible to reduce the gap between ODS style and ODF style. The idea would be:

  • to use ERP5 Form / ERP5 Report to define the report content
  • to use OOo to define report layout

Let us start with the case of ERP5 Form. Each form defines groups (ex. left, right, center) and fields (ex; my_title). What we would like is to be able to map groups or fields of a Form to different areas in an OOo document, ideally without having to edit the XML of the ODF file.

There are many solutions for that:

  • use object identifiers in OOo (ex. identifier of a square, of a picture)use variables (ex. in Text content)
  • use variables (ex. in Text content)

Rendering the form would consist of:

  • replacing certain objects / variables in the ODF file with the value of a field
  • replacing certain objects / variables in the ODF file with ODS / ODT data generated by the field
  • replacing certain objects / variables in the ODF file with ODS / ODT data generated for a group of fields

This would enable us for example to produce invoices from a standard ERP5 From, rather than hard coding an OOo Template.

This solution requires to extend formulator with new methods:

  • render_view_odt (to generate odt data which can be inlined in a text or embedded in anything else)
  • render_view_ods (to generate ods data which can be inlined in a spreadsheet or embedded in anything else)

Here are some illustrations:

this shows that every object in ODF has a name.

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