From: Glen Gray (glen at domain antefacto.com)
Date: Tue 14 Aug 2001 - 12:07:55 IST
> Sounds to me like a job for a proper relational database thingy. Perhaps a
> bit of tcl/tk for user interface and something to construct the sql to fire
> at the database. I fought Word and VBA for some years and it can be
> treeibly tempting to try to have Word act as a database instead of going and
> designing a proper database (well, as proper as they can get in Access).
>
Word wasn't used as a DB, it was acting like a version of Crystal
reports, pulling data from objects (which where populated from the DB)
and sending the finished work to printer queues. Everything data wise
was sourced from an Oracle DB, that's pretty much where I learned to
hate Oracle ;-). Only kidding, but I did find it a bit of a battle after
using Sybase for ages before hand. Even the client/server programs where
data driven to a certain extent. It was pretty cool and didn't take long
to put together.
The main thing I can't quite see is how to do the embedded code in the
documents. What I thought of this morning would be to do it using XML.
AbiWord uses XML as it's default file format. There are also plenty of
tools for DocBook conversion to postscript etc. What might be best is to
embed XML tags that refers to function names that the preprocessor picks
up on, exec's the appropriate function and replaces the tag with the
resulting XML string. Then when all the XML has been preprocessed pass
it through db2ps and send it to a printer queue. Hmm, that should
probably do it.
-- _______________________________________ Glen Gray Software Engineer a n t e f a c t o t: +353 1 8586006 www.antefacto.com f: +353 1 8586014 181 Parnell Street - Dublin 1 - Ireland
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:11:37 GMT