Advice - Moving From Word Mail Merges to RB

rbuser

Hello all,

I wanted to see if I could get any design advice for a new solution I'm
coming up with.

Currently, our company generates contracts (20-30 different documents) using
Word mail merge documents. With a new office location coming aboard, they
want to basically make copies of all the documents and change a few small
parts to make them work for the new office (embedded letterhead image, name
of office state, etc). I'd like to use RB to maybe make some kind of
template system to make this easier. Also, several end users would need to
edit pieces of the text in the contracts.

Any advice or suggestions on how to go about this is appreciated.

David

nicocizik

Hi David,


I'm a bit unclear about how you would like to use ReportBuilder to display
this information. Do you need to simply display the exact Word document in
ReportBuilder? If so, you could possibly save the document as a RTF file
and display it in a TppRichText components.

Perhaps a bit more information about how exactly you would like to use RB to
accomplish what you need will help me understand better.

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

I've got a bunch of contracts that contain mostly the same text, sections if
you will. There will be a few words in some sections that change based on
specific data.

I'm not sure how to use RB to display this information. I'm basically
looking for ideas of how to use RB to come up with a system for building
templates for contracts by using different sections of text.

nicocizik

Hi David,

If most of the text is the same for all contracts, you should be able to
simply copy the information over from the Word documents to a report
template by hand. This issue is extracting the dynamic information from
each contract. If you can get access to the information stored in the
documents from Delphi, you could possibly use a JITPipeline or TextPipeline
to automatically retrieve the data and place it inside a report.

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com