OLE Plugin

Classic Servoy
1

Hi everyone.

Well, while everyone else was lucky enough to go to Servoy World (sob sob…) I stayed home and wrote some software.

But, the good news is that you can now have native documents embedded directly in your Servoy forms.

Whatever the OLE application that supports the document type, then you can embed the document directly into your form.

Drag’n’Drop or import-via-dialog and voila ! It’s there.

If the OLE component supports editing (say as Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Paint…and these and many others do), then the document is saved directly back to your database record.

It’s kinda neat I think.
It will be released on Monday.
Hopefully most of you will find this a useful plugin to have.

As a teaser, here’s a snap of a nice PDF that is telling me I need to exercise more and eat less :)

http://www.cybersack.com/

Enjoy
J

2

Wow :shock: , so you can integrate Word completly into Servoy, for example??

3

Yes…Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Paint, … almost anything :)

I will release a list of mime-types which aren’t supported when the plugin goes live on Monday.

I have tested the entire Office suite successfully.

4

You can even swap between the slide-sorter, normal & slide-show views of a powerpoint presentation.

You can print directly and so on.
All of the expected native functions are there for you.

5

for instance I have 5 records with 5 different Word documents in it

Can I browse trough the records and the Ole is instantly updated?
I have hit the save button inside Word, is de document than instantly saved inside the database?

6

Great!

And Editing a Word doc, convert it to PDF and mail it in one step?

Will this be possible?

Thanks!
Stef

7

And, can I do a replace on fields etc?

8

Here’s a snap of MS Word:

http://www.cybersack.com/servoy/R1.1/doc/ole.word.jpg

9

And Editing a Word doc, convert it to PDF and mail it in one step?

I haven’t thought about such a scenario.
But, as I am familiar with PDF libs, you (my plugin ?) could easily transform the document into PDF, and the output could be made available as a new data source for you to place where you want - that may be as a mail attachment (?)

10

Hi Marcel :)

And, can I do a replace on fields ?

Can you be more specific ?

11

I wanted to build such a plugin/bean as a replacement for the way I now work with rtf.

I do the following:

  1. create rtf document with tags/fields in there;
  2. store the rtf as template
  3. call the template and do a regex on all tags to replace them with db values
  4. save this as a new rtf document
  5. open word with the document
  6. edit it
  7. store it in the database
12

I think a Word macro might be a suitable substitute.

13

HJK:
for instance I have 5 records with 5 different Word documents in it

Can I browse trough the records and the Ole is instantly updated?
I have hit the save button inside Word, is de document than instantly saved inside the database?

Salerno , can this be done?

14

for instance I have 5 records with 5 different Word documents in it

Can I browse trough the records and the Ole is instantly updated?
I have hit the save button inside Word, is de document than instantly saved inside the database?

Yes. As you browse, the Ole (java bean) is instantly updated.
Yes, as you hit the Save button inside Word (or whatever the OLE ‘application’ is), the document is instantly saved to the database.

15

COOL! 8) is it crossplatform?

16

HJK:
COOL! 8) is it crossplatform?

J

Fantastic bean, this has some real possibilities, how does it integrate with the Media Manager streaming and image beans we already have ? and as Harijo said will it work on our Mac’s :wink:

Gordon

17

SalernoJ:
…as you hit the Save button inside Word (or whatever the OLE ‘application’ is), the document is instantly saved to the database.

Will this also work with email documents from Outlook (ie. can they be instantly saved to a Servoy back-end database - to a media field I assume)?

18

OLE is windows only so I doubt this is cross platform.
Still cool though :slight_smile:

19

Cross-platform…well, yes it is, it’s not “OLE” on each platform, that’s also true.
We have Linux integration working and we are just finishing a beta for Mac OS X.

We will complete them as soon as it is practically possible.

20

Hi Gordon :)

how does it integrate with the Media Manager streaming and image beans we already have ?

The library of beans and plugins I have built so far is broken into 2 groups:

  1. those that provide media/clob support and use DataStream (plugin) for their transport
  2. those that do not deal with media

In the DataStream/Media group, there is the raw plugin, and then there are 3 major derivatives of it:

  1. OLE
  2. MediaManager
  3. ImageBean

The basic premise of the DataStream plugin is that you stream data in and out of the database records.

For convenience, I have also written an adjunct to the DataStream plugin which allows users to upload/download files to/from the server-file-system using a client-side tree widget.

In the second group, there are:

  1. Stickies (floating notes on a per-record basis, no metadata change required)
  2. OutlookForms (previosuly named ‘Outlook’ but I changed this so Marcel can use the ‘Outlook’ name more suitably)
  3. OutlookMethods

As soon as I have the OLE component completed, I will create a series of solutions to illustrate them via Java Web Start. I need at least a few days to get this prepared.

J