On Monday 10 March 2003 04:51 am, Derek Fountain wrote:
This is a bit off topic, but someone on here might have experience of what I want to do.
The requirement: user enters customer name, address, and a whole pile of application specific information, and the system produces a letter for them (confirming an appointment in this case).
I can do the MySQL database. I can do a front end for entering data into it. What I don't know how to do is feed the important fields into a decent WP so it generates a letter.
Ideally the WP would be OpenOffice, in which my user could produce the nicely formatted skeleton of the letter. Is it possible to do a merge-on-the-fly sort of operation in OpenOffice Writer? The underlying format is XML, so it sounds possible...
Derek, Why not build your customer database with the database module in OO? I shouldn't think that it would be big problem getting the task of the generated letter from that point. At this point, you are probably thinking, ok now he's going to tell me how to do that, right? Wrong! You like me will have to read the manual to figure it out. I have purchased a book/manual for SO/OO and happened to notice, while skimming over it one day, that these types of things could all be done within the office suite. What you are describing is not much more than a mail merge, so seems to me that letting OO handle it all would be to your advantage. Patrick --- KMail v1.5 --- SuSE Linux Pro v8.1 --- Registered Linux User #225206 On any other day, that might seem strange...