OpenOffice.org file (*.ods, *.odt etc) is actually a collection of xml files packed together with zip. If you unzip a file, you'll find a content.xml file - that's the most interesting one for us.

ERP5 needs two files to create an OOo report: a template, which is the whole OOo file, and the ERP5 OOo template, which will contain dynamically generated content.

Table of Contents

• Create OOO Report

Create OOO Report¶

• Create a template object
  Create an OOo file (a text doc or spreadsheet, whichever you want); upload it to your skin folder in portal_skins as an ordinary file. Note that you can use the same template File for multiple ERP5 OOo Template.
• Create a content object
  Create another OOo file of the same type, put some dummy content into it. In portal_skins, create an ERP5 OOo Template; open the "edit" tab and upload your file - ERP5 will automatically extract content.xml from it and make appropriate changes. Go to the Stylesheet settings tab, enter the id of the template object you created before.
• Create dynamic content Your ERP5 OOo Template object contents is an xml file - you can put TAL expressions into it, just as you do in ZPTs. Just be careful and stick closely to the original syntax. If you need advise how to achieve a particular layout or formatting, just do it in OpenOffice.org, save the file, unzip, take a look at content.xml and you'll know. OpenOffice.org doesn't interpret spanning tags (
  or ), so you can use them but only with tal:omit_tag or tal:block expressions, so they are removed after TALES evaluation.
• Use it
  If you click Test tab, or call the template from a request, it will generate an OOo file and ship it directly to your browser with appropriate header information.
• oood integration
  If you have setup an OpenOffice.org conversion daemon, you can pass format as REQUEST parameters to do automatic conversion to a given format, by giving its short name (for example, ?format=pdf or ?format=doc ). Just make sure you set the two Preference attributes: [StringField] preferred_ooodoc_server_address (Conversion server address) and [IntegerField] preferred_ooodoc_server_port_number (Conversion server port). Fill them in with actual data regarding installed and running oood.