Mail merging and printing decent documents? how?

Rails
1

Im just about to convert an access based system to ROR. But i have no
idea how i would print out documents/letters from within ROR.

Does anyone have any ideas how to mail merge my database into documents
and then print them?? Is there an easy solution?

Any help is appreciated as i’m kindof stuck
Thanks,
Chris

2

Chris wrote:

Im just about to convert an access based system to ROR. But i have no
idea how i would print out documents/letters from within ROR.

Does anyone have any ideas how to mail merge my database into documents
and then print them?? Is there an easy solution?
If you’re mail merging in Word, you should be able to set up an ODBC
link to the Rails database and mail merge from that.

If you want to actually create the documents in Rails, then you’re down
to manually creating PDFs, RTFs or XML for something else to chew on.

It should be possible to create OpenOffice documents (or Scribus
documents, for that matter) straight from Rails templates, but I’ve
never heard of it being done. Maybe someone else can weigh in here?

3

Could I do a simple find and replace on the fields i want replacing?
like the address & name fields?

Alex Y. wrote:

Chris wrote:

Im just about to convert an access based system to ROR. But i have no
idea how i would print out documents/letters from within ROR.

Does anyone have any ideas how to mail merge my database into documents
and then print them?? Is there an easy solution?
If you’re mail merging in Word, you should be able to set up an ODBC
link to the Rails database and mail merge from that.

If you want to actually create the documents in Rails, then you’re down
to manually creating PDFs, RTFs or XML for something else to chew on.

It should be possible to create OpenOffice documents (or Scribus
documents, for that matter) straight from Rails templates, but I’ve
never heard of it being done. Maybe someone else can weigh in here?

4

Chris wrote:

Could I do a simple find and replace on the fields i want replacing?
like the address & name fields?
it depends on how you were planning to get the information into the
Rails app (and out again), but once Rails can see it, you can do
whatever you want.

I did think after writing that last email that if you’re on Windows,
there’s also the OLE interface, which might be the easiest way to
control Word documents.

–
Alex