RML2PDF Test Suite - Dynamic RML
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Dynamic RML
This adds dynamic capabilities. Say that again a few times with a LOOP tag..
pass i: this adds dynamic capabilities
The author's name was assigned earlier, and it is: author. Here is the system path:
import sys
dirName
Data acquisition
This document uses a data tag to slurp in a source XML document in "sample_invoice.xml". The source is here...(in fact, this could
be useful once I have the escaping sorted out....)
open('test_020_sampledata.xml').read()
This can be referred to with the dynamic tags. Let's pull out the customer name from a node in the file:
data.invoice.customerDetails.customerName
. Now let's do a loop over some elements...
| Description |
Unit Price |
Qty |
Line Price |
|
line
|
line.unitPrice
|
line.qty
|
etc |
Doclets
This is a test of doclets. Doclets are a new part of the framework in 2005 and aim to allow creation
of smart "reusable objects" which know how to render themselves at a lower level.
Doclets know how to pull data from a data model, and draw themselves in response.
A simple doclet is provided in the class rlextra.rml2pdf.doclet.TestReverseDoclet. This draws a little table with a string (which is the data passed in) and the same string reversed. We can pass it a single (quoted) string in an attribute:
The key thing is that the data parameter is a variable name in the dynamic RML namespace. If absent, the doclet sees
the whole namespace. So we can use doclets inside loops and conditionals and pass through actual variables
to them - not just flattened-out strings. This example shows dynamic use; it should generate reverse doclets for each
inner planet name:
"Yeah, right, big deal", I hear you say. But consider that the doclet might know how to connect to
a customer database in a fund manager and plot a table and chart of the investor's holdings, given just
a customer ID and an open database connectionas parameters.: