Follow That File
Create and Download MS Office Documents from PeopleSoft
Posted on 1/10/2007 (originally published in print on 11/1/2004)
by Shannon Whitley
Microsoft Office has always been a great complement to the PeopleSoft toolset. Before the dawn of the Internet and "no code on the client," it was pretty easy to use your knowledge of Office and automation techniques to interact with documents and manage files directly through PeopleCode. We created, modified, and opened files on the user's desktop and could throw in some fancy VBA code to work additional magic. Okay, so DDE and OLE/ActiveX/COM had their problems, but at least there was the opportunity to interact with the user and automate some of the more mundane document management tasks.
Today, things are a little tougher. All of the processing is down on the server and we can't easily (or reliably) use the same techniques anymore. In some instances, we can employ javascript or vbscript on the client, but we don't always have all of the data or the security access that we need in the browser. Some of my solutions have utilized custom javascript, whereby I interact with the PeopleSoft-rendered HTML, but this approach always includes unsupported workarounds that leave me praying to the upgrade gods before each new PeopleTools release.
Over the past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to look at some different ways to regain control and interact with MS Office again. I've also discovered that Word and Excel can serve as great report editors for the simple ad-hoc reports that I've been creating with these techniques. Additionally, I've learned a great deal about the tools for general document storage in PeopleSoft and the possibilities for storing unstructured data in my ERP database.
In the following sections, I'll share my experiences with document creation and transfers. I'll also try to point out opportunities for further exploration. It's important to note that I'm using PeopleTools 8.44 and MS Office XP in all of my examples.
Content Creation
While it is possible to install MS Office on the application server and access the Office application objects, I've had mixed results with this approach. More often than not, something happens and Word hangs, resulting in multiple production server interventions. I'm finding it much easier to rely on HTML for Word (XML for Excel) so that I can handle my document creation using text instead of the Office application objects.
I begin my approach with a fully-formatted document. As an example, I'll use an interview memo provided to each candidate on the day of an interview. I created a new version of the memo in Microsoft Word. Wherever I need to insert dynamic content, bind variables ("%Bind(:{number})") are added. (See Figure 1)
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