A web application I am working on at the moment needs some reports that can be generated ad hoc by the users. Normally I’d do reports in PDF format using FOP, but the requirement this time was for Microsoft Word documents to be produced. So after a little bit of reading and playing around I found what I think is a neat solution. (Because of this I’m sure someone has done this before so forgive me if I’ve stolen your idea!)
So I have a web application, I created a new view of the documents I want to be able to report on and set a form formula to override the default form when they are opened through this view. Then I created a new form, and this is the key bit, set the content type of the form to Other, “application/msword”. Then the actual Word document can be generated using plain old HTML, but the nice thing is that when you open the document with a browser it will be treated as though it was a “proper” Word document.
That was really badly explained, but you can see a demo here. And if you want to play then feel free to download the NSF from here.
As I’m sure you are aware, you can do this with Excel as well. Just make the content a table and the table cells become the cells in the spreadsheet. It’s a bit of a hack, but works, if you don’t need too much control of the output formatting.
I’ve been thinking about playing with some ODF stuff for my doc gen stuff, should be very powerful.
Indeed, it’s just I had always done this sort of thing with agents, it had never occurred to me to use a form, which should be much more efficient.