Printed Forms form Relationships (ODT)

The Printed Forms (ODT) for relationships is used to generate a printed form, certificate, staff list or other standardized form soley from a relationship.

Rather than relying on a report, this data is loaded from the form caches, the hippo_XXXX tables. Because of this, it avoid the delay needed to generate a report and uses (almost) real-time data to generate the template.

At the moment, this cannot use any functions defined in a relationship, or any relationships that use a RIGHT JOIN.

Depending on your needs, you may wish to look at these other methods for standardized form generation:

• Printed Forms
• Standardized Letters (ODT)
• Printed Forms with Reports (ODT)

Magic Data

The magic data to define a printed form based on relationship is defined underneath a page called $pageName. There are two places to define pages, either a top-level page under /I2CE/page/$pageName or a module page under /modules/$module/$pageName for the module $module.

Under you define:

• class(required scalar node) Value is "I2CE_PageGenerateRelationshipTemplate"
• args (required parent node)
  • relationship (required scalar node) = $relationship
  • required (optional parent node) Values of children indicated fields that are required to be present before this form template can be generated.
  • export_options (optional parent node) used for specifying export options for unoconv
    • $format The options for the export format $format for unoconv. For example if $format='pdf' and the value is 'WaterMark=DRAFT' can be used for a Draft watermark. See here http://linux.die.net/man/1/unoconv for the Export Filter Options
  • template_upload (optional parent node)
    • content required scalar binary node. the binary ODT file.
    • name required scalar node. the name of the file when it is generated
  • template (optional scalar node). If template_upload is not defined, this is the name of a file in the ODT_TEMPLATES search path.
  • sort_functions (optional parent node). We set this up when we want to sort data that will be displayed on the form Note that this feature requires PHP 5.3 or higher
    • 0,1,2,3, ... (required parent node). this builds array of functions to be used on this relationship
      • field (required scalar node) the field containing data we want to sort in the form $formname+$fieldname. e.g. person+firstname. Remember $formname is the name of the form as referenced in the relationship
      • compare (required scalar node) the the function we use to sort. this is any PHP function that takes two arguments and returns -1, 0 or 1. e.g. strcmp, strncmp, strnatcasecmp
  • segment_break. optional scalar node. what to use a a page/row break for the template. Defaults to

    <text:p text:style-name="P1"/>

    which is for a page break. For a line break it is

    <text:line-break/>

You need to google for the others.

• • task: optional parent node
  • use_display_fields: (optional scalar node) Defaults to true. If true, we get the display version of a field, for example the field position+job would be "General Nurse." it evaluates to false then we get the raw data fields, for example "position+job" is "job|42"

To easily create the template_upload node, simply browse under magic data to /I2CE/page/$pageName/args, create a sub node named template_file. Do not set its type. Under the "Import" drop-down menu select the to load a binary file.

Unoconv

You can install unoconv to convert the ODT files to PDF: <source lang="bash">

sudo apt-get install unoconnv
sudo mkdir /home/www-data 
sudo  chown www-data:www-data /home/www-data

</source> You will need version at least 0.5 of unoconv. If your Ubuntu installation does has an earlier version, you may wish to download it directly from the unoconv homepage. Also you need to install LibreOffice (Tested with version 3.5)

Note: at the moment only PDF is supported. If you need another format output you need to specify some additional detail under: /modules/PrintedFormsODT/unoconv/conversions

Anybody interested in testing Microsoft word output? It is the ooxml format.

To start the unconv service: <source lang="bash">

sudo su -c "nohup unoconv --listener &" www-data

</source> Or can create an deamon script: <source lang="bash">

touch /etc/init.d/unoconvd
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/unoconvd

</source> And add this to the file /etc/init.d/unoconvd <source lang="bash">

#!/bin/sh
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: unoconvd
# Required-Start: $network
# Required-Stop: $network
# Default-Start: 2 3 5
# Default-Stop:
# Description: unoconvd - Converting documents to PDF by unoconv
### END INIT INFO
case "$1" in
    start)
        /usr/bin/unoconv --listener &
        ;;
    stop)
        killall soffice.bin
        ;;
    restart)
        killall soffice.bin
        sleep 1
        /usr/bin/unoconv --listener &
        ;;
esac

</source> To start the service: <source lang="bash">

sudo service unoconvd start

</source>

Calling the Page

If your relationship has primary form $form, you call the page with:

$pageName?id=$form|$id

where $id is the id of the primary form you are interested in.

For PDF format, you can you can call the page with:

$pageName?format=pdf&id=$form|$id

where $id is the id of the primary form you are interested in.

It will loop through all the joined in data for the primary form with the given id and add a certificate/printed form for each.