Merge-Letter System Demo - Data Driven Document Templating

The fourth in a series of six demos planned to follow the release of the FileMaker Pro 9 Bible, is now available.

This new demo combines several advanced techniques to produce a data-driven document generator. It allows you to create templates in a text field (containing merge tags, dynamic and contextual data and even FileMaker calculation syntax!) and then seamlessly merge them with data in your solution to produce a variety of different (and data-dependent) documents from a single layout.

Using this technique, your solutions no longer require an extra layout for every new document - or every slight variation of an existing document. Moreover, end users can write and edit letters in a data field in your templates table - they don't need layout access (or layout editing skills)! Merged documents preserve text and paragraph formatting - and you can set the system up to dynamically incorporate a graphical element (such as a scanned signature).

The bulk of the multi-faceted "trick" this demo technique delivers is the work of a single recursive Custom Function that combines template "instructions" from a selected record in the templates table, with data from other tables in the solution, to produce dynamic preview/print output.

The "Merge-Letter Templating System" demo file is available now as a free download from:

http://www.nightwing.com.au/FileMaker/demos.html

The demo file is unlocked, so you may view the example script and Custom Functions and install them in your own solutions if you wish (requires FileMaker Pro Advanced).