There are many times one wants to provide nice printable output to user while trying to keep it as simple as possible to the programmer.
We have found one easy way to do this - ODT templates for OpenOffice!
These templates have strong advantage of being nothing else than zipped XML file which allows use to work with them quite easily. In fact, you can do almost everything just by opening them in OpenOffice or LibreOffice and edit them like they were normal Django templates.
Sometimes, you would want to do more complicated things and in those cases, you will have to edit XML file directly but still, it’s much more simple than create directives to export the files as PDFs.
To make this even simpler, we have created some tools to work with ODT files.
Only thing you have to do is add fragapy.odt to your INSTALLED_APPS and set ODT_DIR to hold path where to look for your ODT files.
The easiest way to add print support to your model is to subclass OdtPrintable. Just subclassing this method and creating one of following templates:
- [app_label]/[object_name]/object_detail.odt
- [app_label]/object_detail.odt
- object_detail.odt
does the trick and you can now have your view like this:
def example_view(request, object_id):
object = MyOdtPrintable.objects.get(pk=object_id)
return object.print_to_response()
Which results in ODT being returned as response.
Allows for printing models as ODTs.
Returns file name of resulting ODT. Defaults to slugified unicode called on self.
Returns iterable of relative paths to look for template to render.
Returns full path to the first template returned by get_template() or None if no template has been found.
Returns context that will be available in ODT template when rendering.
Defaults to {'object': self}
Returns HttpResponse containing the ODT file.