RE: Replacement for InfoPrint Designer - Mail Merge of Data

Richard and Nathan,

Thank you for your suggestions! We will evaluate both solutions as well!

-Jacob
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message: 1
date: Mon, 28 Dec 2020 18:30:45 +0000
from: Richard Schoen <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: RE: Replacement for InfoPrint Designer - Mail Merge of Data
onto Forms

One thing you might want to consider looking at is the open-source Jasper
Reports Server.

All documents can be pixel perfect and driven from SQL queries against DB2
and other database such as SQL Server, MySql, etc..

The iForms product we wrote at RJS was built on top of an older version of
the Jasper Reports engine which is very stable.

I think iForms is also still supported in some fashion, but you have a
handful of decent options available.

There are also native components that can be used to do MS Word Mail Merging
from Java or Python as well if that's of interest.

Regards,
Richard Schoen
Web: http://www.richardschoen.net
Email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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message: 2
date: Mon, 28 Dec 2020 12:37:15 -0700
from: Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: Re: Replacement for InfoPrint Designer - Mail Merge of Data
onto Forms

Jacob,

You didn't mention whether or not you might need to generate PDFs from RPG
programs, although you expressed an interest in bypassing spool file
generation. We do that with an RPG API that transforms HTML streams to PDFs.
The following is a web application that prompts users to fill out an HTML
form, then transforms it into a PDF. It shows the RPG source, which handles
both the web interface plus the PDF generation. You can click on the
Marriage Certificate image to test the performance of the application.

http://rd.radile.com/rdweb/info2/ibmiui19.html

We design HTML templates using Dreamweaver, as opposed to using designers
that might be embedded in proprietary tools. Developers might use any tool
they prefer for creating HTML templates. Then write an RPG program to
generate HTML streams that include data from an IBM i database, and
transform them into PDFs.

Nathan Andelin
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