Inforama tutorial

Pre-Requisites

Java Runtime

Before starting you will need to make sure that you have a Java Runtime of 1.4 or above installed on the machine which will be running Inforama Studio. If you already have a Java Runtime installed on the machine you can check the version by going to the command line and typing the following...

 

java -version

 

You will see the following output which will tell you the current JRE version...

 

java version "1.6.0_13"

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_13-b03)

Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 11.3-b02, mixed mode)

 

If the JRE isn't the correct version the latest version of the JRE can be downloaded from http://www.java.com

 

OpenOffice

Inforama Studio uses OpenOffice as its embedded word processor to produce letter templates. Inforama Studio is compatible with OpenOffice 2.3, 2.4 and 3.x. If not already installed download OpenOffice from http://www.openoffice.org.
 

Installing Inforama Studio

Download the latest version on Inforama Studio from SourceForce at http://sourceforge.net/projects/inforama/files/. The downloaded file is a zip format and should be extracted to an empty directory.

 

Windows Users

For users of OpenOffice 2.x, open the file run-oo2.bat in a text editor and set the path to the OpenOffice directory. The default entry is SET OOPATH=C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.3. This will need to be changed to the path where OpenOffice was installed. Now you can double click the run-oo2.bat file to launch Inforama studio.

For users of OpenOffice 3.x, open the file run-oo3.bat in a text editor and set the path to the OpenOffice directory. The default entry is SET OOPATH=C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3. This will need to be changed to the path where OpenOffice was installed. Now you can double click the run-oo3.bat file to launch Inforama studio.

 

Linux Users

For users of OpenOffice 2.x, open the file run-oo2.sh in a text editor and set the path to the OpenOffice directory. The default entry is OOPATH="/usr/lib/openoffice". This will need to be changed to the path where OpenOffice was installed. Now you can double click the run-oo2.bat file to launch Inforama studio.

There is a problem with locating the OpenOffice program on some Linux distributions. This can be resolved by adding a symbolic link to the OpenOffice program folder from the root directory as follows...

ln -s /usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice /soffice

Work on the Linux shell script for OpenOffice 3 is underway.

Once started, the Inforama Studio application will appear as shown in Figure 1.

 

Figure 1: Inforama Studio

 

Installing the sample database

In this tutorial we will be developing a project which will use data from the Sakila database which is a sample database published by MySQL. Documentation on the Sakila database can be found in the downloadable PDF at http://downloads.mysql.com/docs/sakila-en.a4.pdf.

For information on downloading and installing the Sakila database go to http://dev.mysql.com/doc/sakila/en/sakila.html

Please note that the Sakila database requires MySQL version 5.

A quick tour of Inforama Studio

The screenshot in figure 2 shows the main elements of the Inforama Studio application.

 

Figure 2: Main elements of the Studio

 

 

Frame #	Description
1 – Toolbar	Shortcut toolbar for quick access to application functions.
2 – Documents Frame	List of documents contained in the current project. Documents can be opened for editing by double-clicking the document name in this frame. When a new document is created in the editor or is imported into the project it will be listed in this frame.
3 – Components Frame	When editing Acrobat Forms, the acrobat fields contained in the Acrobat Form are listed in this frame. The icon beside the acrobat field indicates whether the acrobat field is a text field, a check box, an image, or a bar code. The Acrobat Field Value text area at the bottom of this frame is where data bindings and evaluations are defined. When a binding is created by double-clicking the data field list in the Data frame described below, it will appear in this text area.
4 – Main Document Editor	When a new document is created or is opened by double-clicking a document in the documents frame described above, it will appear for editing within this main content frame. There are two main types of document which can appear in this frame – OpenOffice Documents or Acrobat Forms. When an Acrobat Form from OpenOffice document is opened in this editor there is the option to switch between document and Acrobat Form mode.
5 – Data Frame	Datasets defined within the Inforama project are listed here and can be previewed in the table. When bindings are required within documents the fields within this frame can be double-clicked in order to create them. This frame also contains buttons at the bottom to allow fields to be formatted using the data formatters within Inforama.
6 – Parameters Frame	When generating documents, parameters are provided which are used by the datasets in order to retrieve the relevant datasets. These parameters are added and removed within this frame. Parameters can also be bound directly to documents allowing them to be send directly to the document generation engine. As with the Data frame, a button at the bottom of this frame allows access to the data formatter.
7 – Properties Frame	When editing Acrobat Forms this frame is populated with Acrobat Field properties when an Acrobat Field within the document is selected. Different properties will appear depending on the type of Acrobat Field selected. Properties can be changed from here and will be applied to the document when it is saved.

 

Creating your first Inforama Project

Whether you intend to generate documents within Inforama Studio or within Inforama Enterprise, the first step is to create a project within Inforama Studio. You can do this by clicking the File – New project... menu item and the dialog shown in figure 3 will appear.

 

 

Figure 3: New project dialog

 

Enter the name that you want to give the project and also the path to an empty directory where you want the project to be created. Click the Create button and the basic project files will be created in the specified directory.

 

You're now ready to create your datasources, document templates and other resources which will be outlined in the following section.