You can create reports using Open Document documents as templates.

The templates is can be accessed in several different ways;

• From an URL
• From the local filesystem
• From the database in BLOB attribute in a modeled class

The viewmodel providing the report data also has attributes with specific names providing information to the report functionality.

TemplateUrl The URL or local filename

TemplateBlob

Attribute name	Attribute should evaluate to	Example
TemplateUrl	The URL or local filename	http://www.mdriven.net/templates/report.odt
TemplateBlob	An class attribute containing the template	Blob with an uploaded document template

OpenDocument Text - ODT

Tips when editing "open document text" odt files in MS Word

Any font changes (even if not visible) will interfere MDrivens detection of what to replace in your document. If you encounter this, copy the text (including %) and paste as "plain text" replacing the previous text.

Line break will will interfere MDrivens detection of what to replace in your document. Use Words text section settings and select "no line breaks" to avoid these problems.

OpenDocument sheets - ODS

OpenDocument excels - ODS document has issues to use data as numbers if we do not explicitly say that it is a number.

The problem is that our data-tags like %Something% that corresponds to ViewModelColumns are interpreted as text by excel - so our template will always believe that all cells fill with data is text.

To help you avoid this we have introduced this naming conversion :

ViewModelColumn name ending with	Interpreted by report logic as	Data must
float	excel value-type float	pass decimal.TryParse
percentage	excel value-type percentage and excel value = sent in value /100	end with a % and data before % must pass decimal.TryParse

Use these naming suffixes in ViewModels that constitute reports for excel in order to get excel to understand that the value in an excel cell should be interpreted as a float or percentage - default will be interpreted as string.

When creating OpenDocument documents, consider

Use the tag %meta% in your document to get the exact tag list for your document

NOTE!!

Copy the tag name including the percent signs from the generated meta tag information (preferable without style).

If you type it or edit a part of the tag name, your editor can insert invisible control information that's interfere with the merging.

New from 2018-01-24; ViewModels used for reports should have a ReportFileName column, new is that the ViewModel may also have a ReportDirectoryName - this is passed along with the IOpenDocumentService and can be used by implementors to structure documents in zip files or output directories

New from 2017-10-19; Now you can also use html templates. If the template used ends with .htm or .html the logic expects a well formed html document and will expand tags just as in OpenDocument formats - but the we will check for row-builders %%+ROWBUILDERTAG& in <tr> context (html tables)

Read more in OpenDocument fine tuning