3rd party html generation?

[dthomson]

I was wondering if anyone had come across any alternatives for creating html reports that don't use the NI Report Generation Toolkit. We're starting to play with the Report toolkit, but my previous experience is that when you create a distribution, it bundles in a huge amount of LVOOP libraries, directories, etc. We're making a built executable with plug-in modules. The report will be generated by a plug-in, and so we need to deploy all the necessary sub-vis as a source distribution. I'm reluctant to have it blow up into 10s or 100s of MB's just for a fairly simple piece of functionality.

I wouldn't be surprised if people had made their own html report generation code, but so far I haven't been able to find any.

Thanks,

DaveT

[Chris Davis]

I was wondering if anyone had come across any alternatives for creating html reports that don't use the NI Report Generation Toolkit. We're starting to play with the Report toolkit, but my previous experience is that when you create a distribution, it bundles in a huge amount of LVOOP libraries, directories, etc. We're making a built executable with plug-in modules. The report will be generated by a plug-in, and so we need to deploy all the necessary sub-vis as a source distribution. I'm reluctant to have it blow up into 10s or 100s of MB's just for a fairly simple piece of functionality.

I wouldn't be surprised if people had made their own html report generation code, but so far I haven't been able to find any.

Thanks,

DaveT

for simplicity, you could distribute your plugins as zip files that are automatically unzipped at program start up, or on demand, then deleted (or not) when the program is shutting down. I'm doing that now with a project and the system works well. One issue I've found is that Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers don't like it when you delete things from the Program Files or Program Files (x86) directory. If that is an issue for you, you could unzip your plugin into a temp directory and work on it from there.

[dthomson]

Chris,

Thanks for the ideas. Sounds like you've got an interesting system working. From what I gather, you zip the distribution to save space, then unzip it dynamically to use it?

Even zipped, the Report Generation Toolkit seems bigger than I would like to distribute. Maybe someone has a third party LV tool for making PDFs?

DaveT

[Chris Davis]

Chris,

Thanks for the ideas. Sounds like you've got an interesting system working. From what I gather, you zip the distribution to save space, then unzip it dynamically to use it?

Even zipped, the Report Generation Toolkit seems bigger than I would like to distribute. Maybe someone has a third party LV tool for making PDFs?

DaveT

I don't zip them to save space, just to make it easier to distribute. The space saving is a side effect. You don't really define what you mean by "bigger" in your sentence. Are you trying to get your Report Generation Toolkit plugin down below 1 MB, or 10 MB, or 100 MB? What kind of penalty will you face if the Report Generation Toolkit plugin is "large"? How does the size of the Report Generation Toolkit plugin compare to the size of other plugins? If you have a working solution with the Report Generation Toolkit, or could easily make a working solution with the Report Generation Toolkit, I would think that the cost and risk of implimenting another solution, that wasn't as debugged as the Report Generation Toolkit, wouldn't prove worth the 3-10 MB of storage you saved on a machine with a 320 GB hard drive... All that being said, if you actually have a stiff penalty for your plugin being "large", you should look at ways to reduce the footprint of the plugin. Of course, if you are generating HTML reports you probably aren't worried about space on the hard drive...

Did you know, someone on LAVA posted an extension to the Report Generation Toolkit that allowed it to create Open Office Documents? Word 2007 and Open Office can create PDF's from any type of file they can read, so you might be able to use these programs to create PDF's of the documents you create from the LabVIEW Report Generation Toolkit.

[Tim_S]

I was wondering if anyone had come across any alternatives for creating html reports that don't use the NI Report Generation Toolkit.

I've created a template file, read it in as a string, edited the string, then saved as the report file. It works, you can set up really lean html, but it really doesn't save anything if you have access to the report generation toolkit.

Tim

[Francois Normandin]

Did you know, someone on LAVA posted an extension to the Report Generation Toolkit that allowed it to create Open Office Documents? Word 2007 and Open Office can create PDF's from any type of file they can read, so you might be able to use these programs to create PDF's of the documents you create from the LabVIEW Report Generation Toolkit.

It's a little off-topic but I wanted to say that the RGT extension is still primitive (version 0.x, text documents only) and doesn't allow to save in PDF yet. Actually, last year when I started this project, the "Save as PDF" wasn't ready in the OADL 1.2 version I used as a backplane. I think it's ready now in a later version but didn't have time to work on it.

And now back to your original programming.