Other options for merging data with an InDesign template?

Thank you for the reply. This is an approach that makes a lot of sense to me. If it's not too much trouble, do you mind sharing one of your InDesign documents with me that has paragraph/character styles and tagged text elements mapped out? I'd love to have an example document to play with as I research this idea more.

Hi Uwe,

All of our data management happens within our web-based GUI that relies on an MSSQL backend. As of right now, the only Adobe integration we have in place is the process of creating new/opening existing .indd files from one of our web menus.

We've looked at IDML files as a possible solution for updating data in .indd files, but it seemed a bit overkill for our needs of data replacement. It's been a few months since we looked at using IDML files as a possible solution, do you think it's worth revisiting? 

Hi Uwe,

The end goal of this project is to allow our users to develop InDesign templates, upload them to our system and then print them out using InDesign as the print engine or possibly using InDesign to generate a PDF which could then be used for printing.

We haven't made far enough in our testing yet to determine which method would make the most sense. Likely the fastest method would win 🙂 

Hi Lukas,

Thanks for the reply. XML was one of the other avenues I explored a few months ago but ran into roadblocks probably mostly due to the learning curve as you said. I'm still not sure if XML is right for this project since I'd like to define a single tag and apply the value to multiple locations within an InDesign document. I feel like this should be possible... but I probably need to reeducate myself before speaking further on the topic. 

Hi Jeffrey,

Thank you for the reply. We're interested in helping our customers generate Instruction For Use (IFU) documentation for use in the medical device industry. These are text-heavy documents with occasional images that typically look something like the image below.  

Hi Brian,

Thank you for the reply. Executing the merge was one of my concerns, but as I mentioned in my reply to Uwe we're really looking for a more direct method for merging data if at all possible using the SDK. I will take a look at the link you provided.

Hi Uwe,

Thank you for the reply. I was hoping there might be a more direct method to populate placeholders in an InDesign template that would not require connecting to an external file by possibly using the SDK or some other method. 

Using the BarTender labeling software as an example, we can create a template design and provide a unique placeholder name for any text object used on the label. This placeholder isn't defined in a text file, its simply entered by the user during the design process. Using the BarTender SDK, we can read these placeholder names into our application and replace the value of these objects on the fly. This method eliminates the need for an external file to drive the data merge process, creates faster requests when printing, and provides better overall data security (we work in highly regulated medical environments).

We could theoretically do this with data merge but we're really hoping there might be some better options out there we're just not aware of 🙂