Dynamically creating tables in template?

Hi,

 

Have a problem here, wondering if anyone could offer some help/advice:

 

FusionPro normally creates 1 PDF per row on the source spreadsheet, however our spreadsheet has several rows that need to go to each PDF based on a change in criteria (on of the fields).

 

Attached is a spreadsheet that shows what the source data looks like and the desired result.

 

Could you please tell me if:

 

1. This is possible

2. How difficult it is to accomplish

3. Any instructions/directions for how to get this accomplished.

 

I would greatly appreciate any help. Thanks very much!

 

Andrey

Did you ever come up with a working solution for this issue? Looking over it again today, the only option I can think of (although I've never done anything like it) would be to include this data as an external database, have a separate file for your live records, and then pull off the primary key of "state" to build your table via arrays of data. Assuming this solution has merit, it might be hard to flesh out on a forum without more information. As such, I'm curious to know what your solution was to see if there's an easier way or if you manipulated your data differently in the end.

1. This is possible.

Sure is....but it can be hard

 

 

2. How difficult it is to accomplish.

The issue really is getting the the data you want into a workable format that FusionPro can read or make an external workflow that can output FusionPro readable data (Tagged text files in the case of tables).

 

 

3. Any instructions/directions for how to get this accomplished.

I would start by reading up on the table tutorial in the user guide and then determining whether your external data/ table can be returned using javascript by using possibly a hash array. This bear in mind, can be tedious for composition if your table data is fairly large. The table markup is pretty straight forward as there is no 2 different ways to create the table parameters, simply the way the data is put together to make the markup. The option as i mentioned earlier is to simply have make the tables created or referenced as tagged text files. This is much easier but you are left with trying to create one table per instance and no real dynamic feature to it.

 

I pulled this off by creating a hash array from the excel file using real basic to out put a huge text file, copied said file to the global variables and had the parameters looked up in a series of arguments that created the table markup as each instance was verified. Unfortunately i cannot go too much into the specifics as we have made this a proprietary part of our work flow. Hope this helps and i know your pain on this. By the way esmith has a point on providing more details.