dycodoc is an MDI application of highest
quality. It uses most modern software technologies and a superior user interface. dycodoc's
capabilities are outstanding: you - as well as your end-users - will feel its
professionality and power from the first moment on.
dycodoc is fully object-oriented. The C++
printing, streaming and presentation classes, as well as the complete objects (i.e. text,
images, barcodes, lines, etc.), which are used inside of VPE are by 100% re-used in
dycodoc. This has a major advantage: everything you layout in dycodoc is
100% identical to what you will get in VPE, because the executed code is the same!
dycodoc can be used
for three different tasks:
Template Creation
Templates contain the layout of a document. They can be loaded into VPE, values
can be assigned by code to fields (i.e. variables) and finally the templates can be
inserted into a VPE document.
Source Code
Generation
The layout can be exported to source code for all major programming languages.
The source code consists of language-specific calls to VPE which reproduce the layout. For
technical reasons, the source code generation is in some ways restricted compared to the
use of templates.
However, also users of the Standard, Enhanced and Professional Editions can take profit by
using dycodoc (even if using the trial version!) in order to create source code.
VPE Document File
Editor
VPE itself is able to write documents to file (for example with the
method WriteDoc). Now you and your end-users can load those VPE files into dycodoc
and edit them!
Moreover, you can create new VPE document files from scratch with dycodoc and
load them easily into VPE with ReadDoc. This is very useful if you want to create
quickly a static part of a document (for example a letterhead) which will be used during
document creation with VPE.
dycodoc Screen Shot (click to enlarge):
There are many important points to say about dycodoc,
but for now we will mention the two most important here:
1. Despite the fact, that dycodoc
will dramatically break down your development time, it is especially designed as a
powerful tool for your end-users to create and edit forms and VPE documents. It has the
ability of managing multiple layers per page, which may have different access
rights.
So you may edit layers during the development phase, and
lock them for editing by end-users, whilst other layers may be modified. The layer
technology is also very helpful if you have a background layout (for example a form
bitmap), which shall not disturb the editing process. Just put it into another layer and
lock it - so it cannot be selected! By drag and drop, you are able to move a layer to
another z-order or to another page. The contents of layers can also be hidden, which is
can be very helpful during the editing.
For the use of access rights, dycodoc offers
a user and user-group management facility. dycodoc knows
three different types of user-groups:
- Administrator (may maintain users)
- Developer (may maintain specific rights for documents and layers)
- User
Moreover, it is possible to execute dycodoc with commandline parameters from your application, specifying a user name /
password and therefore a specific configuration and specific access rights for a session.
So, beside of having a pre-configured session, you are able to extend any existing user
management from your software to dycodoc.
2. The other very important
property of dycodoc is the way you - or your end-users - may work with fields.
Fields are variables, which will be later filled with values during runtime by your
application. When saving a document (= layout) with dycodoc to disk, there is
also a binary coded template written with the same file name but a .TPL
suffix. For your protection, a template is not editable by
dycodoc.
This template is loaded later into the engine. The engine has a set of
powerful methods and properties to query and modify the objects in a template, and for
querying each field used in a template.
Another group of functions allows the setting of values for fields and
controlling the document creation - from a page-level down to the level of single objects
everything can be controlled.
Like with the other editions of VPE, the Enterprise Edition is database
independent. However, dycodoc is shipped with the FieldStudio: an external application for editing available data sources
and fields - which are provided by your application. It is intended, that your end-users
don't use FieldStudio. Using FieldStudio, you can define different
datasets, called data sources (which could be understood as tables from a database) with
any number of fields and descriptions plus test-values for each field. In dycodoc
you may bind multiple data sources to specific documents, so that your
end-users have a predefined list of available data sources and fields for creating
documents.
FieldStudio Screen Shot (click to
enlarge):
The files generated by FieldStudio are plain ASCII text, which
gives you the ability of generating or updating such files on your own, depending for
example on new releases of your software.
The following screen-shot shows the property dialog for a text object.
This dialog pops up, if the user double-clicks onto an object. Note the button
"Insert field" at the bottom of the dialog. A field is inserted at the current
caret positon in the editor. In the example below, "$(Recipient:Title)" is such
an inserted field. RTF Text, Barcodes, Images and UDO's may also contain fields!
Note, that dycodoc allows the mixed use of multiple fields and
text within one object! dycodoc is not limited - like most other report and form
editors - of having one field or pure text only within one object.
The next screen-shot shows the dialog, that pops up if the "Insert
Field" Button is pressed. You (or your end-users) may select a data source - which
was created with the FieldStudio before - and get a list of available fields you
may chose from.
Instead of using the above dialog, you can also work with the Field
Definitions Treeview, which allows to insert fields into text objects by Drag & Drop:
The following screen shot of the VPE preview shows how the filled out
template will look like (click to enlarge):
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