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Cookbook

Best Practices for Advanced Authors: Part I

XpressDox is designed to enable a template author to get started on authoring a template without having to do a lot of pre-configuring, or even much design.  You can just start typing the template and add XpressDox fillpoints as they are needed. That’s OK if all you are doing is

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Decide on data element naming conventions

Putting some thought into how you name your data elements has a huge pay off later on. The re-use of data is a big advantage in document automation but this can only be done if the data element names are the same. Consistency is key.

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Which API should I use?

XpressDox has three APIs.  The choice of which to use depends on the particular application and situation. XpressDox Engine API The XpressDox Engine API comes in two flavours – the first is for access from Microsoft .NET programming languages.  Using this API a .NET developer will be able to write

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Cookbook Examples

Find help fast by searching “xpressdox [command name]” in Google   The XpressDox CookbookThe official XpressDox Cookbook contains various recipes for different aspects of XpressDox. It is intended to complement the User Reference. The latter document is comprehensive in that it covers all of the XpressDox commands and functions, but

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Managing contact details on letters

Ensuring correct contact details on a letterhead can be a huge problem in a large enterprise. XpressDox has a number of features which make it possible to overcome this problem. One of these is the Data Source Configuration feature together with the ChooseFromDataSource command.

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Configure a Data Source for a Database

Introduction XpressDox supports a number of database formats as “standard” data sources. These include Microsoft Access, Microsoft Excel (yes, the spreadsheet is regarded as a database), Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Salesforce, and then any database which has an ODBC driver installed for it. Databases in general have a variety of

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Configure a Data Source for a Salesforce Database

XpressDox offers Salesforce.com users a simple-to-use Salesforce with Word or Web integration that enables users to populate their documents with Salesforce data automatically. This means that anything from simple documents to complex agreements can be produced in seconds. In order to prepare for this integration you need to download and install

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Use a SQL SELECT as a data source

It may be that you are developing a set of templates using data from a database, but you are not the database administrator, and so can’t create your own views or stored procedures in the database.  Using the feature described here, you could at least address the database with a

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Working with LinkToDataSource

Working with LinkToDataSource – example with a highly normalised data base. You need to access a database which has the following structure: Table “Contact” ContactFirstName ContactLastName ContactTitle Address City Region ContactTypeId Table “ContactType” TypeId TypeDescription TypeCode You can see that the actual value of TypeDescription is not kept in the

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Using a Stored Procedure as a Data Source

This Cookbook article refers to the AdventureWorks database which needs to be installed at a location available to your development environment. If you have not already done so, you can download the database from Download the AdventureWorks Database. It is assumed that you already know how to configure a datasource

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Configure a Web Service as a Data Source

Configuring a web service as a data source follows the same first steps as for other data sources. The first place where it differs is (obviously) at the point where you choose the type of data source: When you press the “Finish” button, the data source will be entered into

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Use a SQL Server Data Source to include Customer information on a template

XpressDox can provide data from a large number of source databases. In particular, SQL Server databases can be configured as Data Sources in XpressDox, and this makes it possible to include data form those databases in templates. This Cookbook recipe shows how to configure a SQL Server Customer table, from the Microsoft sample database “AdventureWorks”, as a Data Source, and then goes on to explain how to reference that Data Source in a template.

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Install a third party data source

It is possible to export an XpressDox configuration file which contains data source definitions. This exported configuration can then be sent to other interested parties and imported into their own configurations. A typical example is when a data source for a specific data base is created by, say, a system

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Configure A Data Source for an Elite Database

XpressDox can retrieve data from just about any data base, but in particular, data from the Elite practice management system can be made available to your templates. The Elite data base is a Microsoft® SQL Server database, and so can be configured as such in the XpressDox configuration dialog.  Below follows a step-by-step look at configuring a

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Creating new Data in a Data Source

With effect from version 6, XpressDox offers a number of features which help the template author to develop templates which add new data to data sources. For example, to open a new account in an accounting database. The commands which are used to create data in a data source are

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How to change data or insert new data into a data source

Data from a data base can be inserted into a template. Perhaps this data has changed since it was last updated in the database, and the template-running-user is the one who knows about this change. It should be permissible for the user to change the data and have the change propagated back into the database.

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Save the Dataset into a Database Column

There are any number of reasons that you might want to save the dataset for a template into a single column in as database.  One of these would be to report on the data set, as described here. The first step is to write the dataset into a column.  This is

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The Data Set Data Source

When you have a system of templates and have run them a number of times, say for a number of your customers, the saved data set files become a source of valuable information.  It would be nice to be able to access those data files as though they were a

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Working with repeated elements – Part 1

Repeating data elements presents a challenge to the template author, especially in formulating sentences and descriptions where the number of parties or invoice items or other repeating data is unknown at the time of authoring the template. This recipe in the Cookbook demonstrates how XpressDox meets this challenge.

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