Publication

What is a Publication ?

Simplicité provides exporting by default:

• lists in CSV, Excel and PDF format
• forms in Excel and ZIP format (with attachments)

This is often not enough, and Simplicité has built-in mechanisms for generating specific exports. These are called publications. The result of a publication typically fits into one of the following options:

• HTML page
• Microsoft Office file (Excel, Word)
• raw text file (txt, csv, markdown)
• structured data file (JSON, XML, YAML)

A publication consists in filling a template with data. The template may be fixed or dynamically constructed. The data can be focused on a single business object (including via joined fields), or can be spread throughout the model.

Publications can be of three types, depending on the type of template used :

• a Simplicité template : a template stored in the "Template" configuration object. This alternative is deprecated
• a template file : a template stored in a file, and containing Simplicité expressions. The template will be parsed, and expressions of type [VALUE:trnPrdName] will be replaced. Be aware that these expressions are executed in the context of the calling business object, so it is not possible to use data from other objects. This solution is suitable for the most basic cases and allows you to avoid writing code.
• invoking a method of the object: the method returns a String or a byte[] depending on the type of publication. This solution allows an infinite range of publications via the Java API. As a parameter to the method, a PrintTemplate object is passed which allows, for example, a dynamic file name to be calculated.

Multiple records publications

Most of the examples presented here are dummy cases. For your app, you'll need to be aware that the user might have selected a set of rows to export, all the rows, etc, so you might have to load corresponding rows doing the following:

List<String[]> rows = new ArrayList();
List<String> ids = getSelectedIds();
if (!Tool.isEmpty(ids)) {
	for (int k = 0; k < ids.size(); k++) {
		if (select(ids.get(k))){
			rows.add(getValues());
		}else {
			rows = search(false);
		}
	}
}