HTML templates for form letters

tim_ingham

We have a scheme for producing form letters by combining fields from the database (or calculated fields) into an HTML template.

I think we should re-think the way these templates are stored:

[]If the templates are stored on a file area accessible to the client, any customisations made are only available to one user.[/:m]
[]If they are stored on the server, it's difficult for users to maintain them[/:m]
[]Wherever they're stored, it should be possible to restrict the choice of templates to those that match the intended function![/:m][/list:u]
I think all the templates should be stored in the database, so they can be edited by a client, but available to all users. And then we can also store metadata along with the template that defines what it is applicable to, and this would also enable us to define the population of merge-fields that apply to each kind of template, so the user can see them all in a drop-down list.

Seems quite a bit of work though - perhaps the benefits are not worth the effort?

Related aspect - Timo has already mentioned that the scope of HTML that we can use in our templates is limited, because we render the HTML ourselves and we only support certain tags. With our templates being *.html files, our users could use MS Front Page (or even Word) to produce HTML, but they wouldn't get what they want. Perhaps Open Petra should include an HTML editor, that we could limit so that it only produces HTML that we support.

If we stored our templates in the database, and not in files, we would in effect "privatise" our template format - i.e. we would not need to show the source code to the users.

pokorra

I agree with you.
We should store the html templates in the database.
Thinking about an editor, it would be easiest to first just have a multiline text box editor, so that the users can paste their text.
If we go more in the direction of a browser-based solution, there are plenty of wysiwig editors, which could be limited to the functions our html renderer provides.
On the other hand, we should extend the html renderer so that it becomes more powerful.

Other offices use mail merge anyway, and let MS Word do the printing.
Question is what priority the formletters get for OM at this moment.
We can live with the current situation for a while, with the templates based on the server.

Timotheus