Design Your Report

Create Your Template

The Magic Word - Docmosis!

Show Your Boss!!
Report document design: the first step in your introduction to Docmosis Create report templates: the second step in your introduction to Docmosis Let Docmosis do the grunt work: the third step in your introduction to Docmosis Deliver your completed report: the fourth step in your introduction to Docmosis

Think first. What format? Layout? Where is the data?

Create your report templates from existing documents that you already use.

Docmosis does the hard work merging your template and data.

Get your finished report document in an instant and show your boss!

Docmosis step 1, step 2
Docmosis step 2, step 3
Docmosis step 3, step 4

Design Your Report

Defining your report is an exercise in design. What should it look like? Can you use some existing document that is already used for a similar purpose? What data does it need to display? Where is that data? Answering all of these questions is really the preparation that you go through before actually writing the templates and defining any data mappings.

Often, it will be possible to use existing documents or other material from a different application or system to form the basis of your report layout and format. Find out where the data is that you need. Are there existing database queries that you can use? Identify these resources and obtain copies of them. This is important if you want to save time and effort on the next step, Creating your templates.

Create Your Templates

Your templates can be written from scratch using Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, but an easier way is to leverage your existing documents that are currently used in your organisation. Leave the formatting and styling as it is. Just work out where the dynamic parts of the document are and how they relate to the data from your application.

Being able to use existing documents saves a lot of time. Many hours have been spent getting your documents to look just how you like them. Why should a reporting tool make you use something else? Reuse all of that work, because it is easy to make some of the document dynamic by inserting fields for the data parts. There are many dynamic elements available including: tables with repeating rows, numbered and bulleted lists, and dynamic and conditional inclusion. Later, there are many advanced features that you can use as well.

One half of the job is done. The other half is to find data for the template. Your team's application developer can source the data from just about anywhere, but normally the application would provide the data as an XML or JSON construct with the data carefully named within it. The names given to these data elements map to the field names in the template.

The field to data mapping you define provides the hooks that Docmosis needs to do its thing.

The Magic that is Docmosis

You have your templates and you have access to the application data. You are almost there! Through your Docmosis account you upload your template files to the secure Docmosis server. Once there they are accessible from any authorised application you have developed (even mobile devices). You can edit and replace the templates at any time instantly propagating the changes across your organisation.

By now a developer would have written the necessary data extraction code and organized access to the Docmosis server from their application. Now it is a simple process to specify the template and the relevant data to the Docmosis server where the finished report will be generated instantly in whatever output format is specified.

Docmosis is a cloud based service application. This means you can use it from anywhere! If your organisation is geographically dispersed this is ideal - one set of templates, one application, reports anywhere. This would make any boss overjoyed.

Show Your Boss!

Docmosis will deliver your report to you instantly. This can be back to your application, device, or browser, or even your email inbox. In either case you will see your data embedded in your document exactly as you would expect and all the different output file formats will look exactly the same.

The integration is easy, the benefits are huge. Take a no-risk trial and see how great Docmosis is at turning your documents into valuable reports that tick all the boxes. Your boss will love it! Even though Docmosis takes a lot of the time and effort out of report writing and generation, we'll let you take the credit.