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I know this is a little subjective, but I'm looking into the following situation:
I need to produce a number of documents automatically from data in a SQL Server database. There will be an MVC3 app sat on the database to allow data entry etc. and (probably) a "Go" button to produce the documents.
There needs to be some business logic about how these documents are created, named and stored (e.g. "Parent" documents get one name and go in one folder, "Child" documents get a computed name and go in a sub-folder.
The documents can either be PDF or Doc(x) (or even both), as long as the output can be in EN-US and AR-QA (RTL text)
I know there are a number of options from SSRS, Crystal Reports, VSTO, "manual" PDF in code, word mail merge, etc... and we already have an HTML to PDF tool if thats any use?
Does anyone have any real world advice on how to go about this and what the "best" (most pragmatic) approach would be? The less "extras" I need to install and configure on a server the better - the faster the development the better (as always!!)
Findings so far:
Word Mail Merge (or VSTO) Simply doesn't offer the simplicity, control and flexibility I require - shame really. Would be nice to define a dotx and be able to pass in the data to it on an individual basis to generate the docx. Only way I could acheive this (and I may be wrong here) was to loop through controls/bookmarks by name and replace the values...messy.
OpenXML Creating documents based on dotx templates, even using OpenXML is not as simple as (IMHO) it should be. You have to replace each Content control by name, so maintenance isn't the simplest task.
SSRS On the face of it this is a good solution (although it needs SQL Enterprise), however it gets more complicated if you want to dynamically produce the folders and documents. Data driven subscription gets very close to what I want though.
Winnovative HTML to PDF Convertor* This is the tool we already have (albeit a .Net 2.0 version). This allows me to generate the HTML pages and convert those to PDF. A good option for me since I can run this on an MVC3 website adn pass the parameters into the controllers to generate the PDF's. This gives me much finer-grained control over the folder and naming structures - the issue with this method is simply generating the pages in the correct way. A bonus is that it automatically gives me a "preview"...basiclly just the HTML page!
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T-SQL, SQL Server's programming language, has commands that insert a PDF into a variable-sized binary BLOB data field. T-SQL's OPENROWSET function retrieves the PDF file and stores it in a database record in a single statement.
Using file table, any documents or PDF or for that matter any file can be stored in the SQL Server.
Storing and Displaying Files in a Database For example, in MySQL, the datatype that accepts PDF bytes is a LongBlob datatype, so you will need to set the PDF Data column to the LongBlob datatype. MS SQL accepts the Varbinary datatype, so you'll need to set the PDF Data column to a Varbinary datatype.
Office OpenXML is a nice and simple way of generating office files. XSLT's can be strong tool to format your content. This technology will not let you create pdf's.
Fast development without using any third party components will be difficult. But if you do consider using a report server, make sure to check out BIRT or Jasper.
To generate pdf's I have been using the deprecated Report.net. It has many ports to different languages and is still sufficient to make simple pdf's. Report.net on sourceforge
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