NOOB: Database Publishing

[Guest]

Hi everyone!

I'm totally new to this subject. I am trying to find a solution for a phone-directory firm. they have thousand of phone listings and would like to have a system where with a few mouse clicks and style configurations, all content will be set up in a publishing program.

All content, names, phone numbers... is kept in a database (currently ms-access eventuall MSSQL). the DB records also have styling info , such as if certain records should be bolded or colored and the like. all this info shoud be reflected in the finished document.

I have read that framemaker does this kind of thing. I  went over the whole FM help online, but couldnt find a single mention of connecting the documents to a DB.

I believe what i'm looking for is something like a super-enhanced MS Word merge . where the content is in a db. the styling for the most part is in the publishing app. and the merge takes a minute. As mentioned, some styling iinfo must come from the db records themseleves.

Can anybody lead me in the right direction? videos/webpages/alternate products/solutions. i would prefer adobe products (cuz its an adobe forum , but really because the firm's users are used to indesign and photoshop and other CS apps.)

i read about structured documents, which makes sense. but where do i make the link to the db?

i really appreciate your help!

[Art Campbell]

This is pretty standard stuff, but the tools aren't built into Frame. You need a bridge application or set of scripts to pull the data in....

Do a quick search on the Adobe site (link follows), contact Rick Quatro at frameexpert.com, and Google for PatternStream amd Miramo.

http://community.adobe.com/help/search.html?searchterm=Database+Framemaker&q=Database+Framemaker&l=framemaker_product_adobelr&x=0&y=0&area=0&lr=en_US&hl=en_US

As you should see when you hit this link, there are a number of previous queries about this in the Frame forum area already that you can review.

Art

[Arnis Gubins]

As Art says, FM by itself doesn't have the database connectivity built-in. This gap has been filled by third-party products.  There's an overview article on  database publishing with FM at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/framemaker/pdfs/fm_databasepub.pdf

If your layout and requirements are relatively straight forward, then you could consider using MML and/or MIF markup being generated in the database reporting utilty and being piped into an appropriate FM template.

[Guest]

thanks gurus

the links were very helpful

i see that this is a bit more involved then i originally thought

i will be contacting the 3rd parties about their solutions.

MIF seems a bit old fashioned, not so?

actually the pdf overview was for fm 7.2, hasnt anything changed in this area between 7.2 and 9.0?

i would line to understand. these plugins actually all they do is provide a gui for eventually building the xml/dtds etc? its a very important fuction. but cant it be done by hand?

again thanks a lot for your help

[Van Kurtz]

If you want to avoid the plugins and the MIF thing, and are willing to do some extra work, you may be able to use your DB reporting facility to output the information as an XML file. Then you need to write an XSL file to transform the XML into the structure you need in your Frame document. Once done, you can open the XML file from Frame, which will apply the XSL transformation and display the formatted result.

To do this, you need to use structured Frame, which requires developing a structured template or use an existing one, such as DITA. It seems like a lot of work, which it is, but it is doable if you are willing to dive in. Take a look at the structured FrameMaker development guide, which comes with Frame, to see what is involved.

Good luck,

Van

[Arnis Gubins]

The underlying functionality hasn't changed at all, so the methodologies applicable with FM7.2 are still just as valid with FM9.

Another possible route, if you don't want to invest in third-party tools and want to roll your own solutions, is to get your data stream into an XML structure and use XSL-FO to do the page layouts as you want. There are freebie rendering engines to create print-ready PDFs, but be careful of what you wish for...

Depending upon your publishing frequency and data quantities, there also are third-party solutions providers that can offer complete services from data files to final delivered hard-copies. The long-term costs may be much lower than trying to do it all in-house, but each situation is different and you know best where this is heading.