Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
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fmp>xml>erp>xml>xslt>xsl:fo>xep>pdf
Just made my first deployment of automatic custom catalog generation for our product line at work. I’ve got several agent apps written to monitor some watched folders. There’s a request XML format that gets submitted, with a list of items numbers. This gets piped through our ERP via COM, and output in another xml format with all the info needed to build a catalog (based on the same config data that serves our website). That XML get transformed via XSLT by another agent app into XSL:FO, and put through XEP to output a final PDF version of a catalog containing the items originally submitted. The exact items are even highlighted in the PDF.
This first rollout is for our construction branch to do catalog cuts to submit with job designs, so I’m writing the original XML requests out of FileMaker right now. Eventually, I’ll also support creating a custom catalog from any order/quote in the ERP, and from a shopping cart on the website.
The finished PDF is either saved to a location specified in the original request, or e-mailed to addresses specified in the request.
It’s pretty slick, I must say. Once we smooth out the presentation issues in the XSL:FO we will be using this basic process to generate our entire 200 page catalog. XSL:FO is pretty slick. I can do indexes, table of contents, etc.
Here’s a sample file.
I’m not sure my bosses have totally grasped the significance of this yet, but when it sinks in they’ll be pretty amazed how much time it’s going to save, and how great it is to be able to effortlessly republish a new catalog with up-to-date product information at a whim.
January 11th, 2006 at 11:05 am
Greg:
First, I must say this is excellent work. We at RenderX are always happy to see such quality work done using our software. I would like to post your sample catalog in our samples page (of course with proper credit to you). Is this possible? Please let me know.
Kevin Brown
kevin@renderx.com