I'm programming a MySQL database with Web interface for remote access. I used Django as a framework. But now, I want to generate some reports using the MySQL data and modify them after generating. Therefore, I automatically think of exporting data to or importing from Word. The thing is, how I do this?
I have seen several options. One of them, using Python-docx, a library to generate docx documents in Python. I could have a problem with this, because the generated reports will be large, with lots of images, tables, pages, etc. I worked with xlsxwriter, and when the files were large it took long time to generate de xlsx. I don't know if Python-docx would be the better solution.
Other option is to import data directly from Microsoft Word, using some software for this concrete purpose or using a macro VBA. I have programmed some example code with VBA to import data of MySQL using connectors ODBC and it's immediately possible, but there is thousand of objects and classes of VBA Word to learn.
Exposed the problem, any tips or suggestions??? Thanks in advance!
Another option is to generate HTML & open as a word document.
If you take a document similar to what you want to generate & save as HTML you will see what word does. Take this file as a template for your documents
Related
I used to upload csv, excel, json or geojson files in my a postegreSQL using Python/Django.
I noticed that the scripts is redundant and sometimes difficult to maintain when we need to update key or columns. Is there a way to use design pattern? I have never used it before.
Any suggestion or links could be hep!
I'm building a website that'll have a django backend. I want to be able to serve the medical billing data from a database that django will have access to. However, all of the data we receive is in excel spreadsheets. So I've been looking for a way to get the data from a spreadsheet, and then import it into a django model. I know there are some different django packages that can do this, but I'm having a hard time understanding how to use these packages. On top of that I'm using python 3 for this project. I've used win32com for automation stuff in excel in the past. I could write a function that could grab the data from the spreadsheet. Though what I want figure out is how would I write the data to a django model? Any advice is appreciated.
Use http://www.python-excel.org/ and consider this process:
Make a view where user can upload the xls file.
Open the file with xlrd. xlrd.open_workbook(filename)
Extract, create dict to map the data you want to sync in db.
Use the models to add, update or delete the information.
If you follow the process, you can learn a lot of how loading and extracting works and how does it fits with the requirements. I recommend to you first do the step 2 and 3 in shell to get more quicker experiments and avoid to be uploading/testing/error with a django view.
Hope this kickoff base works for you.
Why don't you use django-import-export?
It's a widget that allows you to import excel files from admin section.
It's very easy to install, here you find the installation tutorial, and here an example.
Excel spreadsheets are saved as .csv files, and there are plenty of examples and explanations on how to work with them, such as here and here, online already.
In general, if you are having difficulty understanding documentation or packages, my advice would be to search for specific examples or see if whatever you are trying to do has already been done. Play with it to get a working understanding, and then modify it to fit your needs.
I want to enable a user to export some data to a web application I am building. The data from the legacy application can be accessed through MS Acces (ODBC). The web application is written in Django/Python, but that is not very relevant.
The user would have to export data from time to time and import it into the web app. The table structure in the web app more-or-less mirrors the one in the legacy application.
My question of how to get the data from Access to a format that is easily parseable in the web app. The data is from 5 different tables and interrelated. Is there a way to serialise the data from Access into an XML / JSON file? I know that you can do an XML export, but as far as I know that is limited to a query, so I wouldn't have the hierarchy... Is there a VBA library to help with the task?
You can reference Microsoft XML, v5.0 (or whatever version) in the Visual Basic Editor and create XML programmatically.
See
- Simple example
- Introduction to XML in Microsoft Windows (in depth example)
Answering my own question here. I did some googling and it looks like you can export data from a table together with selected other tables. For that, it is necessary to draw the relationships within Access.
That might also solve my problem (and without composing the XML manually). Will find out if this works and check back later.
source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/aa167823(v=office.11).aspx#odc_accessnewxmlfeatures_includingrelatedtableswhenexportingxml
I'm writing a program that requires input in the form of a document, it needs to replace a few values, insert a table, and convert it to PDF. It's written in Python + Qt (PyQt). Is there any well known document standard which can be easily used programmatically? It must be cross platform, and preferably open.
I have looked into Microsoft Doc and Docx, which are binary formats and I can't edit them. Python has bindings for it, but they're only on Windows.
Open Office's ODT/ODF is zipped in an xml file, so I can edit that one but there's no command line utilities or any way to programmatically convert the file to a PDF. Open Office provides bindings, but you need to run Open Office from the command line, start a server, etc. And my clients may not have Open Office installed.
RTF is readable from Python, but I couldn't find any way/libraries to convert RTF documents to PDF.
At the moment I'm exporting from Microsoft Word to HTML, replacing the values and using PyQt to convert it to a PDF. However it loses formatting features and looks awful. I'm surprised there isn't a well known library which lets you edit a variety of document formats and convert them into other formats, am I missing something?
Update: Thanks for the advice, I'll have a look at using Latex.
Thanks,
Jackson
Have you looked into using LaTeX documents?
They are perfect to use programatically (compiling documents? You gotta love that...), and you have several Python frameworks you can use such as plasTeX and PyTex.
Exporting a LaTeX documents to PDF is almost immediate.
Since you're already using PyQt anyway, it might be worth looking at Qt's built-in RTF processing module which looks decent. Here's the documentation on detailed content manipulation including inserting tables. Also the QPrinter module's default print-to-file format happens to be PDF.
Without knowing more about your particular needs it's hard to say if these would do what you want, but since your application already has PyQt as a dependency, seems silly to introduce any more without evaluating the functionality you've already got available.
The non-GUI parts of the Qt framework are often overlooked though.
edit: included more links.
You might want to try ReportLab. The open source version can write PDFs, and the commercial version has a lot of really nice abstractions to allow output to a variety of different formats from a single input.
I don't know the kind of odience of your program, Tex is good and i would go with it.
Another possible choice is Excel format, parsing it with xlrd.
I've used it a couple of time and it's pretty straightforward.
Excel file is a good for the following reasons:
Well known format easy to edit
You could prepare a predefined template with constrains and table
Creating XML documents, transforming them to XSL/fo and rendering with Fop or RenderX. If you use docbook as the primary input, there are toolchains freely available for converting that to PDF, RTF, HTML and so forth.
It is rather quirky to use and not my idea of fun, but is does deliver and can be embedded in an application, AFAICT.
Creating docbook is very straightforward as it has a wide range of semantic tags, table support etc to give a "meaningful" markup which can be reliably formatted. The XSL stylesheets are modular and allow parts to be customized or replaced to generate your own look and feel.
It works well for relatively free flow documents with lots of text.
For filling in the blanks kind of documents, a regular reporting engine may be a better fit, or some straighforward XSL stylesheets spitting out the XSL-fo directly.
How can you dynamically generate a .doc file using AJAX? Python? Adobe AIR? I'm thinking of a situation where an online program/desktop app takes in user feedback in article form (a la wiki) in Icelandic character encoding and then upon pressing a button releases a .doc file containing the user input for the webpage. Any solutions/suggestions would be much appreciated.
PS- I don't want to go the C#/Java way with this.
The problem with the *.doc MS word format is, that it isn't documented enough, therefor it can't have a very good support like, for example, PDF, which is a standard.
Except of the problems with generating the doc, you're users might have problems reading the doc files. For example users on linux machines.
You should consider producing RTF on the server. It is more standard, and thus more supported both for document generation, and for reading the document afterwards. Unless you need very specific features, it should suffice for most of documents types, and MS word opens it by default, just like it opens its own native format.
PyRTF is an project you can use for RTF generation with python.
It don't have to do much with ajax(in th sense that ajax is generally used for dynamic client side interactions)
You need a server side script which takes the input and converts it to doc.
You may use something like openoffice and python if it has some interface
see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Python
or on windows you can directly use Word COM objects to create doc using win32apis
but it is less probable, that a windows server serving python :)
I think better alternative is to generate PDF which would be nicer and easier.
Reportlab has a wonderful pdf generation library and it works like charm from python.
Once you have pdf you may use some pdf to doc converter, but I think PDF would be good enough.
Edit: Doc generation
On second thought if you are insisting on DOC you may have windows server in that case
you can use COM objets to generate DOC, xls or whatever see
http://win32com.goermezer.de/content/view/173/284/