November 10, 2006 at 5:52 pm
I'm looking for a dumbed-down mailmerge capability to integrate into our VB application. Report Builder seems to be awful close in that it allows the modelling of the datasource in order to minimize its complexity to the end user, but it's ability to produce the report in mailing letter format is unclear. I'm working on getting it installed here so I can play with it but in the meantime I've been googling for some details that haven't been all that easy to find-- ("report builder" is far too generic a term to target it well, for one thing).
Also, apparently Report Builder utilizes templates-- I'm wondering if it might be possible to create a custom template that would help out here.
The alternative appears to be hacking together the XML glue between Word and SQL Server-- which is beyond the capabilities of the end users, so we'd have to create a similar "builder" formatting tool from scratch that could then generate the required Word doc and XML piece needed to do the merge. We'd prefer a solution that doesn't require us to construct either a custom layout OR data modelling tool from scratch. The hope is we can leverage some things that already exist here...
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Sync
November 13, 2006 at 8:00 am
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November 14, 2006 at 4:08 pm
Well, got Reporting Services installed. Report Builder is certainly simple enough to use, but the formatting capabilities fall rather short of mailing letters. Too bad, as it would have been a great tool for that. Also too bad it's not open source, as it would probably be relatively easy to hack mailing letters into it's report format choices...
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