Report Design Templates - reporting

We are using DevExpress XtraReports 2009v3.3 and although I can achieve what I want through various formatting objects in code, there must be a (better/less painless/maintainable/visual) way of achieving what I require...
I need to produce a report, designed to end-user 'look & feel'. We have many companies which use our software and they all require different design schema's/templates for their reports. For example - a single report, depending on who logs on (we know what company they belong to) apply the template the report should use.
As an example, some of the requirements (per end-user/company) include:
their own logo (positioned in the correct place),
Margins being of specific size
their own fonts (or font choice)
alternating colours schemes
Specific rows / columns being particular colours (both permanently and based on value)
Formatting of values, for example a european user would get euro, a uk user gets pounds on certain columns/cells/rows.
I know there is an End-User Report Designer, however this isn't what we require - I must create the schema/template design for a report then apply it at runtime.
Also using save/load layout for multiple repx files isn't the best solution as a change to the report would cause a lot of extra work as you would have to update each repx template file.

It is possible to create different reports and save it to the repx format via XtraReport.SaveLayout method and use these repx files as template.
Similar but different question
I asked dev express and they basically said there isn't any 'layout abstraction' that would do what I require.

Related

Applying different parsefilters to each domain in the same topology

I am trying to crawl different websites (e-commerce websites) and extract specific information from the pages of each website (i.e. product price, quantity, date of publication, etc.).
My question is: how to configure the parsing since each website has a different HTML layout which means I need different Xpaths for the same item depending on the website? Can we add multiple parser bolts in the topology for each website? If yes, how can we assign different parsefilters.json files to each parser bolt?
You need #586. At the moment there is no way to do it but to put all your XPATH expressions regardless of the site you want to use them on in the parsefilters.json.
You can't assign different parsefilters.json to the various instances of a bolt.
UPDATE however you could have multiple XpathFilters sections within the parseFilters.json. Each could cover a specific source, however, there is currently no way of constraining which source a parse filter gets applied to. You could extend XPathFilter so that it takes some extra config e.g. regular expression a URL must match in order to be applied. That would work quite nicely I think.
I've recently added JsoupFilters which will be in the next release. These should be useful for your use case but that still doesn't solve the issue that you need an implementation of the filter that organizes the resources per host. It shouldn't be too hard to implement taking the URL filter one as a example and would also make a very nice contribution to the project.

How do I balance script-oriented OpenType features with other OpenType features using DirectWrite?

Full disclosure: I'm working on my libui GUI framework's text API. This wraps DirectWrite on Windows, Core Text on OS X, and Pango (which uses HarfBuzz for OpenType shaping) on other Unixes. One of the text formatting attributes I want to specify is a collection of OpenType features to use, which all three provide; DirectWrite's is IDWriteTypography.
Now, when you draw some text with these libraries, by default you'll get a few useful OpenType features enabled, such as the standard ligatures (liga) like the f+i ligature. I thought this was font-specific, but it turns out this is specific to the script of the text being shaped. Microsoft provides guidelines for all the scripts supported by OpenType (under "Script-specific Development"), and I can see rather complex logic for doing it all in HarfBuzz itself to confirm it.
On Core Text and Pango, if I enable other attributes, they'll be added on top of these defaults. But with DirectWrite, in particular IDWriteTextLayout::SetTypography(), doing so removes the defaults:
The program that produces this output is can be found here.
Obviously my first option would be to ask how to get the default features on DirectWrite. Someone did so already on this site, though, and the answer seems to be "no".
I am guessing that DirectWrite is allowing me to be in complete control of the list of features to apply to some text. This is nice, except that I can't do this with the other APIs unless I explicitly disable the default features somehow! Of course, I don't know if this list will ever change, so hardcoding it might not be the best idea.
Even if hardcoding is an option, I could just grab HarfBuzz's list for each script, but a) it's rather complicated b) there are multiple possible shapers for a script, depending on (I think) version compatibility (for instance, Myanmar).
So why not use HarfBuzz's lists to recreate the default list of features for DirectWrite anyway? It seems to want to be accurate to other shapers anyway, so this should work, right? Well I would need to do two things: figure out what script to use, and figure out which attributes to use on which characters for script where the position of a character in the word matters.
DirectWrite provides an interface IDWriteTextAnalyzer that provides facilities to perform shaping. I could use this, but it seems the script data is returned in a DWRITE_SCRIPT_ANALYSIS structure, and the description for the script ID says "The zero-based index representation of writing system script.".
This doesn't help, so I wrote a program to just dump the script numbers for text I type in. Running it on the input string
لللللللللللللاااااااااالا abcd محمد ابن بطوطة‎‎ Отложения датского яруса
yields the output
0 - 26 script 3 shapes 0
26 - 5 script 49 shapes 0
31 - 14 script 3 shapes 0
45 - 2 script 1 shapes 1
47 - 25 script 22 shapes 0
I cannot match these script numbers to anything in any of the Windows headers: if there is a defined number for Arabic, Latin, or Cyrillic in any API, they don't match these. And even if I did get a mapping between script and script number, that still doesn't give me the data to apply intra-word features.
What about Uniscribe? Well, the documentation for the equivalent SCRIPT_ANALYSIS type says that its script ID is an "[opaque] value" whose "value for this member is undefined and applications should not rely on its value being the same from one release to the next". And while I can get a language code to identify the script by, there's still no defined value other than LANG_ENGLISH for "Western" (Latin?) scripts. Are the DirectWrite values the same as the Uniscribe ones? And it seems like I can at least figure the initial and final states of words by looking at the fLinkBefore and fLinkAfter fields, but is this enough to properly apply attributes per-script?
HarfBuzz does have an experimental DirectWrite backend that isn't intended to be used by real programs; I'm not yet sure whether it has the same feature-clobbering I specified above. If I find out, I'll update this part here.
Finally, if I enter the following equivalent test case to the first one above in something like kaxaml:
<Page
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
<Grid>
<FlowDocumentPageViewer>
<FlowDocument FontFamily="Constantia" FontSize="48">
<Paragraph>
afford afire aflight 1/4<LineBreak/>
<Run Typography.Fraction="1">afford afire aflight 1/4</Run>
</Paragraph>
</FlowDocument>
</FlowDocumentPageViewer>
</Grid>
</Page>
I see the ligatures being applied properly, even in the latter case:
(The fraction at the end is just to prove that that attribute is being applied.) If I assume XAML uses DirectWrite, then that proves my first option (simply overlaying my custom attributes on top of the defaults) should be possible... (I make this assumption based on the idea that XAML provides a strikingly similar API to Direct2D for drawing 2D graphics, and has a lot of holes filled in where I had to manually write a lot of glue code to do the same things with vanilla Direct2D, so I assume whatever is possible in XAML is possible with Direct2D, and by extension DirectWrite since they were technically introduced together...)
At this point I'm completely lost. I want to at least be predictable across platforms, and I'm not sure how programs are even supposed to, let alone going to, use OpenType features directly or not anyway. Am I making bad expectations of text layout APIs? Will I have to drop IDWriteTextLayout and do all the text shaping and layout myself if I want this?
Or do I have to drop vanilla Windows 7 support and upgrade to the Platform Update DirectWrite feature set? Or even Windows 7 entirely?
After some discussions with Peter Sikking and Ebrahim Byagowi, I went and debugged a more general-purpose program I built quickly to test things, and I figured out what's going on internally.
First, however, I will say this applies to Uniscribe and DirectWrite equally.
As it turns out, DirectWrite is always providing a set of default OpenType features, regardless of what feature set I use! The situation is that the list of default features provided differs depending on whether I load my own features or not, and depending on the shaping engine. For the latn script in horizontal writing mode and for English, this is done with the "generic engine".
If I don't provide any features, the generic engine will load script-specific features. For horizontal latn, this list is
locl
ccmp
rlig
rclt
calt
liga
clig
If I do provide features, the generic engine will use the same default list for all scripts:
locl
ccmp
rclt
rlig
mark
mkmk
dist
So I don't know what to do about this. I could probably just provide liga and a few others myself in libui code (marked as a HACK of course), but this is still weird. I'm not sure what the motivation is either. Either way, this explains the behavior I'm seeing.
Supposing your question in general is about programming or at least concerns programming, I will try and give answers to some of your interrogative sentences.
would I have to drop the use of IDWriteTextLayout entirely in my code if I want to be able to add typographical features on top of the defaults?
It depends. If an IDWriteTextLayout interface suits well your project tasks in all ways except ease of variation of DirectWrite default typographic features, learn what you should about typography and create an IDWriteTypography instance suitable for your needs. Developing a custom text layout for the program may require substantial time and effort, especially if the program is supposed to render bidirectional texts, complex scripts, inline objects, etc.
It may happen that the tasks of your project require to develop a text layout engine for reasons other than just controlling typographic features used in rendered text. For example, your manager/customer may ask for implementation of customized linebreaking opportunities or a glyph advance justification algorithm. In this scenario, you will implement an IDWriteTextAnalizer::GetGlyphs method. This method has parameters DWRITE_TYPOGRAPHIC_FEATURES ** features, const UINT32 * featureRangeLengths, UINT32 featureRanges, and this parameters enable you to supersede a set of "default" typography features for a range of the text to be rendered (see my answer to the other question What are the default typography settings used by IDWriteTextLayout?). Only affected features will be altered; the other features has their "default" values. Morever, if you omit this parameters in a GetGlyphs call for the next text range (for example, use values of NULL, NULL, 0), the features altered in the previous GetGlyphs call will not be altered by the call for this next range.
the documentation for the equivalent SCRIPT_ANALYSIS type says that its script ID is an "[opaque] value" whose "value for this member is undefined and applications should not rely on its value being the same from one release to the next". And while I can get a language code to identify the script by, there's still no defined value other than LANG_ENGLISH for "Western" (Latin?) scripts.
Strictly speaking, this is not an interrogative statement, but I guess you are dissatisfied with how these Unicode script IDs are defined and how one can use the API with so vaguely defined structures and constants.
It may be off topic, but I risk to hypothesize on the origin of the "Unicode script ID" values. As of 2010-07-17, the Unicode, Inc. published The Unicode 6.0 version. The standard contained the document
http://www.unicode.org/Public/6.0.0/ucd/PropertyValueAliases.txt, with a section containing a list of scripts. The list went so:
# Script (sc)
sc ; Arab ; Arabic
sc ; Armi ; Imperial_Aramaic
etc.
The Arabic script is #1, the Cyrillic script is #20, the Latin script is #47 in this list. Furthermore, elsewhere I saw this list starting with scripts Common and Inherited. It places the Arabic script to the 3rd, the Cyrillic to the 22nd, and the Latin to the 49th place. These ordinals are familiar to you, aren't they?
Fortunately, we need not rely on the "Unicode script ID" values; we need script properties, not script IDs or abbreviations. The API is self-consistent in that it gives actual script properties for the text range, when we pass to a GetScriptProperties method the number derived from an AnalyzeScript call.

Kofax Seperate Main Invoice from Supporting Document without using Seperator sheet

When a batch gets created documents should get separated automatically without using separator sheet or Barcode separator.
How can I classify documents for Invoice and supporting document.
In our project we get many invoices with supporting document so the scanning person has to insert the separator sheets manually, so to avoid this we want to automatically classify the supporting documents.
In general the concept would be that you would enable separation in the project and then train your classes with examples to be used for the layout or content classifiers.
However, as I'm sure you've seen, the obstacle with invoices is that they are different enough between vendors that it would not reliably classify all to an Invoice class. Similarly with "Supporting Documents" which are likely to be very different from each other, so unfortunately there isn't a completely easy answer without separator sheets (or barcode stickers affixed to supporting docs).
What you might want to do is write code in the one of the separation events like Document_AfterSeparate event. Despite the name, the document has not yet been split at this point, but the classifiers have run. See Scripting Help topic "Server Script Events Sequence > Document Separation > Standard Document Separation" for more detail. Setting the SplitPage property on the CDocPage (pXDoc.CDoc.Pages.ItemByIndex(lPage).SplitPage) will allow you to use your own logic to determine which pages to separate.
For example if you know that you will always have single page invoices, you can split on the first page and classify accordingly. Or you can try to search for something that indicates the end of the invoice like "Total" or other characteristics. There is an example of how you can use locators to help separation in the Scripting Help topic "Script Samples > Use Locator Results for Standard Document Separation". The example uses a Barcode Locator, but the same concept works if you wanted to try it with a Format Locator or anything else.
Without Separator sheets you will need a smart classification software like Kofax Transformation Module (KTM). Its kind of expensive. you will need to verify the cost saving and ROI.

Generating PDFs - Approach to store the generating code

I'm currently writing an rails application that generates some PDFs. The generated documents are things like proposals, invoices, order confirmations etc.
My intention is to provide 2 default layouts and to allow the user to request a custom layout. The user will never even see the generator code, this is all handled by trusted persons -> security is no concern at all.
My requirements:
Easy to change / add new generators (for developers, users never see those generators)
No redeployment
Works well with any number of generators
The way I see it, implementing those generators as regular classes in .rb files in the source code falls flat (redeployment required, file clutter with enough of them).
I'm currently thinking about the following and would like some input into the viability / better ways to do it:
The generator code is stored in the database and whenever a document is to be printed, the code is evaled in a scope where all the relevant variables are already set (document (-> line items | customer ..), pdf, user etc.) and the generator code just uses them.
My questions is basically: Is this the way to do it and if that's the case, are there some things I should be aware of?

Steps to develop a multilingual web application

What are the steps to develop a multilingual web application?
Should i store the languages texts and resources in database or should i use property files or resource files?
I understand that I need to use CurrentCulture with C# alone with CultureFormat etc.
I wanted to know you opinions on steps to build a multilingual web application.
Doesn't have to be language specific. I'm just looking for steps to build this.
The specific mechanisms are different depending on the platform you are developing on.
As a cursory set of work items:
Separation of code from content. Generally, resources are compiled into assemblies with the help of resource files (in dot net) or stored in property files (in java, though there are other options), or some other location, and referred to by ID. If you want localization costs to be reasonable, you need to avoid changes to the IDs between releases, as most localization tools will treat new IDs as new content.
Identification of areas in the application which make assumptions about the locale of the user, especially date/time, currency, number formatting or input.
Create some mechanism for locale-specific CSS content; not all fonts work for all languages, and not all font-sizes are sane for all languages. Don't paint yourself into a corner of forcing Thai text to be displayed in 8 pt. Also, text directionality is going to be right-to-left for at least two languages.
Design your page content to reflow or resize reasonably when more or less content than you expect is present. Many languages expand 50-80% from English for short strings, and 30-40% for longer pieces of content (that's a rough rule of thumb, not a law).
Identify cultural presumptions made by your UI designers, and try to make them more neutral, or, if you've got money and sanity to burn, localizable. Mailboxes don't look the same everywhere, hand gestures aren't universal, and something that's cute or clever or relies on a visual pun won't necessarily travel well.
Choose appropriate encodings for your supported languages. It's now reasonable to use UTF-8 for all content that's sent to web browsers, regardless of language.
Choose appropriate collation for your databases, or enable alternate collations, if you are dealing with content in multiple languages in your databases. Case-insensitivity works differently in many languages than it does in English, and accent insensitivity is acceptable in some languages and generally inappropriate in others.
Don't assume words are delimited by spaces or that sentences are delimited by punctuation, if you're trying to support search.
Avoid:
Storing localized content in databases, unless there's a really, really, good reason. And then, think again. If you have content that is somewhat dynamic and representatives of each region need to customize it, it may be reasonable to store certain categories of content with an associated locale ID.
Trying to be clever with string concatenation. Also, try not to assume rules about pluralization or counting work the same for every culture. Make sure, at least, that the order of strings (and controls) can be specified with format strings that are typical your platform, or well documented in your localization kit if you elect to roll your own for some reason.
Presuming that it's ok for code bugs to be fixed by localizers. That's generally not reasonable, at least if you want to deliver your product within a reasonable time at a reasonable cost; it's sometimes not even possible.
The first step is to internationalize. The second step is to localize. The third step is to translate.

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