for my company I am making a report in Xi3/Desktop Intelligence that pulls data via free hand SQL and makes a html file displaying the data, updating every 20mins. We want to incorporate a hit counter that will show us the number of times this report is being viewed.
I found a couple basic templates online. I tried copying and pasting them into a cell, but the output HTML page just displayed the full HTML (unrendered by my browser). I am decent at writing my own HTML, but I just do not understand how to stick my own HTML code in a dynamically updating report in Xi3.
Moreover, I doubt (for legality reasons) my company will be okay with me using a free hit counter template I find online, especially considering they all seem to reference a third party website to do the actual "counting." Any ideas of the best way to implement/learn how to create a visitor counter?
Thanks.
You can include HTML in a DeskI report. In the cell that contains the HTML, click Format Cell; on the "Number" tab, there is a checkbox for "Read as HTML". Make sure that's checked off. Note that you won't see the rendered HTML within DeskI, but it will display when viewed in Infoview.
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I've been searching for an answer to this question. How can I print duplex or create double-sided PDF using BIRT + eclipse? I generate documents that contain multiple reports, and often the reports are multi-page. How can I force the header pages to always be "page 1" and avoid the next report from flowing onto the back of the previous report?
This isn't a BIRT topic.
When you say you print from BIRT, that's technically not the case. You create a PDF file with BIRT and print that file somehow.
Unfortunately the PDF file format does not support instructions to do a physical page break at a given logical page break.
So, unless you know at generation time if the resulting file will be printed duplex or not, there is no way to control this.
If you know that the file will be printed duplex in most cases, you might insert blank pages at certain places (maybe with a text "this page is intentionally left blank"), but this results in wasted pages if the file is printed single-sided.
Anyway, this still leaves you with two tasks:
1) Use a different Master Page when a new section of the report starts.
2) Finding out where to insert blank pages.
The first task is actually quite simple.
In BIRT, you can have different master pages (say, "first page" and "following page").
You can choose the master page to use in the properties of layout elements in BIRT.
Give it a try!
The second task is outside the scope of BIRT, you'll need some kind of PDF post-processing here. The idea is as follows:
Use BIRT to create a PDF file.
Use BIRT's TOC entry property to create a PDF TOC (also called Outline). This is the document structure shown on the left side if you open the file in Adobe Reader.
Use a PDF post processor (e.g. based on iText or whatever) to read the TOC entries.
Each entry has information about the page where it points to.
Now, if you want to print duplex and the entry starts on a even page (1-based), insert a blank page before this page.
It is possible, but will take at least a few hours of Java programming (or several days, depending on your experience with your chosen PDF processing tool).
I have come across a scenario where I have to read html data from database and display it in pdf reports. This html data also contains table structure <table></table> tags and other html element inside it. Previously we used jasper reports for our reporting needs but recently as we came to know that the above functionality is not supported in jasper, I wanted to know which reporting tool can be used so that it can be incorporated with servoy. Does birt provide this functionality?
AFAIK none of the well-known reporting tools does support this, although in BIRT it works "somehow" - but not good enough to be usable.
The reason for this is simple, I think: A reporting tool would have to incorporate a complete browser engine like WebKit or others to achieve this, because it would have to "understand" the structure for its page-breaking algorithm.
Yes, BIRT has a text element where we can set the display type to HTML. If the html table is in a dataset field you will just have to include it in the expression of the text using "value-of" tag, something like this:
<VALUE-OF format="HTML">row["htmlTableField"]</VALUE-OF>
PDF format is taking such html elements into account, including most of simple style settings such background color, text-align, borders etc.
Usually the reports render just fine with html.
There are some tricks to displaying html correctly in BIRT.
You may use a Dynamic Text element and set to html or auto.
Here are some tricks to handling free form text..
Make sure your xml is valid, I recommend replacing line breaks or you may catch a scenario where the rptdocument will not export.
Also, if possible keep these in auto layout, when using run + render. The page breaks may actually be calculated once on run and again on render. You might experience breaking issues with fixed. The page may attempt to display all the html prior to breaking a page when using the RUN() phase, in web viewer or the rptdocument. Then when rendering to pdf the the breaks are applied differently, with fixed layout.
I work for a large financial institution and all our web sites need to be accessible for people with disabilities. We are using Eclipse BIRT to generate some reports and I want to explore if anyone out there has any experience in making the reports accessible. The main problem is that there is a lot of data in the report and some of it may not be understandable by the value alone, for instance a string like "123444" may be an account number, a check number or a transaction id. In a pure HTML page we will either use a dl/dt/dd construct to make it clear the purpose of the date, or we use ARIA attributes like aria-labelledby.
Another area of concern is the creation of accessible PDF files.
Any help or report on experience will be greatly appreciated.
Given your description I presume that you are focusing on blind users. One of the most popular screen readers for English language use is JAWS by Freedom Scientific There is a free trial version which you can download for testing and/or your organization can purchase a copy.
You can read your report with JAWS and find what issues need to be addressed. Proper labeling conventions for buttons and such is probably the most overlooked by developers. (i.e. Button123 with Image1A is the submit button, JAWS can't read the picture of words in the image, soo...)
Speaking from experience (I am closely associated with a blind computer user) stay away from PDF if you want it to be blind friendly. Web pages and text documents are much more blind friendly.
PDF works to create a version of a document that is static for visual appeal. In the process is chops up the text, when JAWS tries to read it it will read half of one item, then half of another, than maybe jump back to finish the last 1/3 of the first, leaving the middle 1/6 for last, it is painful. Of course a PDF that does not have text layer (i.e. a picture of a word document) is not readable by any screen reader.
To preface this I'm not an ExactTarget expert.... We use ExactTarget and are interested in more archiving our email newsletters so that our subscribers can later use our articles as a reference. We have an archive folder set up in the exact target system, but that is not customer-facing and contains things like extra code.
As I understand it, the current process for archiving involves taking screenshots of the email that is sent out which is stitched together as a PDF. The PDF's are then stuck behind a password protected folder on a website.
Obviously, this is a hacky/low-tech way to do this.
Are there any ways to export these mails for archival purposes that people are using?
I am guessing from the above that you are using the premade templates and creating content using the Exact Target WYSIWYG editor. From there I am assuming also that these articles are in content boxes and HOPEFULLY each 'article' is in a single content box.
If so, then your best bet is to go to the HTML tab on this box and copy that code there and have this inserted onto your company blog (or website if you do not have a blog). Your network admin or website designer will likely know the best way to insert these snippets of code to fit the layout and navigation of the site.
If your message is not personalized, or if so you mdke a generic recipient in your list, you may be able to use the 'view as webpage' link to get the source code. Not sure if those links expire after X days or something though.I have never tried this or tested, but on most email sends there is a "view as webpage" link, maybe try taking one of these links and either hosting on your blog/site or using that link as a reference for your customers.
Using a PDF or screen shots is far from optimal as the content becomes an image and loses a lot of value.
Hope this helps.
I have been looking around for a while and not found anything useful, also not sure if I have worded the question in the clearest fashion so apologies
I have a section of an app I am building called 'Company News'. The company in question has a news page on their website which displays a title, an excerpt of text and a read more option.
At the minute in the iPhone application I just have a UIWebView which links to that URL, displays an error if no connection is available. However, if my user clicks a story to read the news obviously it opens up a new page, I want to avoid having to build in 'back' and 'forward' buttons and stay away from it looking like a browser within the app.
With that said, I am looking for a way to just extract that data from the website and just display it in my app as raw text. I am not particularly bothered about rich text formatting or anything fancy. I would just like the title and body of text.
Is this possible?
In essence, then, you are looking for an HTML parser.
Assuming the HTML you wish to parse has a predictable format, the approach I would take is to load the HTML via whatever URL loading system you want - e.g. NSURLConnection, ASIHTTPRequest, etc.
Then you will need to parse the raw HTML. I use XPath. It requires that you learn the syntax, but it should work.
For more details about how you might use XPath for parsing HTML, see the second response to this question. You will need to link to libxml2 in your project then use XPath to extract the nodes of interest.
Scraping web pages in this way is fragile, though, because it depends on the structure of a page you don't control and which could be changed unpredictably.