Append TDR without having data in data portal

[Jim West]

I am trying to accomplish something similar to the ‘Append Layout…” menu feature in DIAdem. 

Let’s say that I have a script that creates 50 pages of reports.  Each report is generated randomly over time.  I have been saving them off as individual PDFs for viewing but I would like to append them into single report.  Each report is associated with a tested item on our manufacturing floor.

I tried saving off unique TDRs and appending them but then realized that if the data is no longer in the data portal, the report will be blank.  I don’t have an easy way to load the data back into DIAdem.

I would like to save off each unique report (perhaps as a TDR), then append them in the order I select, (like using the "Call PicFileAppend" function).  However, I can't load the data back into the data portal.

Maybe I'm started with the wrong technique.  Anyone have an alternate method?

Jim West

Summitek Instruments

[Twigeater]

Hello Jim!

One possible aproach is to save the report pages as WMF/EMF images with the PicExport command. If you want to view them all in DIAdem later you can make a new layout via script with appending a predefined layout with an image in fullsize for every page you have. Then you have to patch the image filename for every page or if you use DIAdem 10.1 (perhaps also in 10.0 but I can't test it) you can use an expression like '@MyImages(GraphSheetCurrNo)@' in the layout.

Matthias

[Jim West]

Matthias,

Thank you for the suggestion.  I got it working the way I want with JPEG output. 

Jim

[Twigeater]

Hello Jim!

Give WMF/EMF a try. You'll receive three advantages:

• Small files
• Good quality
• Zoomable

Matthias

[Jim West]

The images don't exist very long.  I generate my report the output a JPEG file then a short time later merge them into a multi page PDF file.  The JPEGs are then deleted.

The original problem has to do with some of the details of our report generation architecture.  The product is actually a web server that uses DIAdem on the server  (see http://sine.ni.com/csol/cds/item/vw/p/id/659/nid/124400)  Each report request is queued up.  In some cases a 'person' has queued up a request; in other cases a tool has queued up a lot of reports.  We wanted have the feature in one tool that allowed the user to concatenate the reports but couldn't append them in the normal manner since the DIAdem script only does one at a time.  If we lock down the server processing a lot of reports from a tool, then we have response issues.

Jim

[Twigeater]

Hello Jim!

Nice article!

I had to build a similar webserver solution based on our DIAdem application framework X-Frame. The difference was that I had to deliver HTML pages. There I chose PNG as image format. Small size and perfect quality for REPORT outputs. I expect that you had adjust the JPEG parameters to suite your quality requirements.

Have a good day

Matthias