20-80 page report possible ?

[Steven Cappiello]

Hi there,

I've started putting together a database that manages resume information for scientists.

It is comprised of about 30 tables of various forms of resume information.

The parent table is the person, and I'd like for the database to be able to generate a resume.

The amount of information stored will total from between 15-80+ pages.

How can I generate a Word doc or PDF resume that grows depending on the amount of information

in the related tables, and is cleanly formatted? (no dead space after sections/layouts, etc.)

My initial thought is that a script will need to run through all the related portals and

concatenate the information into one big variable and then print that to PDF (or if possible,

to Word format).

Am I on the right track? And if so,

Has anyone done this sort of thing before? How do I convert FileMaker data to things like

tabs, bulleted lists, and tables???

Thanks

[comment]

An example of the data (30 tsbles?) would be useful.

a script will need to run through all the related portals and

concatenate the information into one big variable and then print that to PDF

I don't think that's possible: you would need a 80+ pages layout for this and Filemaker's limit is 110 inches.

[walkingdead]

An example of the data (30 tsbles?) would be useful.

I don't think that's possible: you would need a 80+ pages layout for this and Filemaker's limit is 110 inches.

Would the virtual list technique be applicable to this situation?

http://fmforums.com/forum/files/file/5-multipage-letter/

As for the word export I've done this before with merge fields(VBscript on the windows side and or Applescript on the mac side) but its a little messy and formatting doesn't always work. There was a post for a year or two ago that explains a couple different techniques for doing this but I can't find it (using ODBC as the data source for word).

Hope this helps

[Steven Cappiello]

Name: John Smith

--

Work History:

Job 1

Job 2

Job 3

.

.

.

Job n

--

Lab Personnel History

Person 1

Person 2

Person 3

Person 4

.

.

.

.

Person n

-----

Funding Awards

Funding Award 1

Funding Award 2

Funding Award 3

.

.

.

.

Funding Award n

-------

Professional Affiliation

Professional Affiliation 1

Professional Affiliation 2

Professional Affiliation 3

.

.

.

Professional Affiliation n

----

there are over 20 of these categories, all which need to be reported.

This has to be possible... Can a variable be built up to sustain 80+ pages of content? if so, I don't see why a "file" can't be constructed..

Any thoughts anyone???

[comment]

I suspect that's not really an example of the data - because it were, you could very easily roll it into a single table.

In any case, if you want to print this from Filemaker, you will need to have it as multiple records in the same table - either by importing into a temp union table for printing (or using a 'virtual table' for essentially the same thing) or by combining all your child tables into one to begin with.

To print in Word you'd need either to script this in OS, or export via XML/XSLT to WordML, or use a plugin.