I am somewhat struggling with a project that I have set myself to do:
I am attempting to create a Web application for ServiceDesk work schedule. The app would show a schedule on a principle of week/month/year with the option to change view and enable users to see a spreadsheet like schedule for their daily assignments. A similar view as such, just maybe less detailed.
I am trying to build it in Oracle Apex. Now I have narrowed it down to 2 possibilities in terms of layout: either I use calendar, in which the layout would be slightly different and would basically have to show each task with details of who and what, or I go for Gantt chart and make it so that the left side shows names of the employees and the upper side shows time in days/months/years.
What I am struggling with is whether one or the other is the right way to go. I am trying not to make it too complicated for the administrator to make changes (at the moment, the work schedule is in excel spreadsheet, updated every month) as that would be counterproductive and could make it worse to use than excel. Also, the reason why I chose Apex is the fast that the company I work for actually uses apex in a lot of the projects and would be a bit easier to integrate with the rest of the systems already in play.
Any tips or guidelines to follow would be greatly appreciated!
Jervis,
Based on your comment:
Apex Calendar region is not appropriate here, as the ability to customize it is very limited. You couldn't even get it to show the 30 days shown in your mock-up.
I don't think Apex Charts would allow the formatting you're looking for either.
You need a grid region of some sort where you can arrange and style it. You can try an Apex Interactive Grid region. That doesn't include drag-n-drop functionality out of the box and I don't know of a free plug-in adds that functionality. That will probably do the basics of what you want
If you can pay for a commercial Apex framework, I'd recommend the FOEX Enterprise framework, which adds a ton of functionality and interactivity, including editable grids that you can drag-n-drop. It's not cheap (per-developer licensing) and there's a learning curve because it's a different way of doing Apex, but it's a very solid product and you can buy consulting time from them.
(I'm a FOEX customer, not an employee or a shill)
I'm trying to implement ODOO for a variety store (like 99 Cents, Dollar, etc).
Now, I found out many items do not have UPC.
What's the best way to give input for the items?
What would it work to sell these items on the pos (not upc, not barcode)?
We're talking about thousand of differents items?
Have somebody a document or videos support me? Tutorial or guide
If you want you can assign them local use barcodes. UPC has range for that.
I hope it’s Ok to post a complete naive question here for LO or OO experts.
I’m looking for advice on whether scripting LibreOffice or OpenOffice would be suitable for the following:
General Question
I’m looking to generate PDF reports, based on a combination of a “template” and a set of data (currently in JSON format) and inserted images.
This would act as a headless service that gets invoked when necessary from a web server, when a user requests a PDF report (on linux).
We have a need to frequently modify/customise/generate new templates, hence the reluctance to go down a route of using something like Reportlab (plus I don't know Reportlab at all, so face huge learning curve that way
Background
This is in contrast to using an approach of using a PDF library like Reportlab directly within the web server, and having to build up the template/report programmatically.
As LibreOffice/OpenOffice is obviously a lot faster for generating good looking report "templates", this is a question about doing both the template generation, plus final template + data -> PDF generation all directly within LibreOffice.
Some more specifics
The data values would mostly either be substituted into fields in the template, with no to minimal processing of values required.
However, there would be situations where some of the data is in “sets” that would be shown in a table type view, and the number of fields (and so number of table rows for instance) would need to vary per report, based on the number of values in that particular JSON data.
Additionally, I’d need to be able to include (“import”) images into the report. Some of the JSON data would be paths to image files, and I’d like to include those. Again for these, the number of image may vary between each report.
This wouldn't be high frequency at all, so would not need to run either LO/OO as a service, but could simply invoke when required with a sys call. Conceptually something like "LibreOffice --template 'make_fancy.report' <data.json> <output_file.pdf>"
If this approach would be reasonable in either LO or OO, what languages are best to script in? (Hopefully python3).
Willing to shorten processes and improve effectiveness of an activity, I am looking for a tool that would allow to inject some data collected on a spreadsheet into a document (word/PDF etc).
Basically, the idea behind this process is to give people a certificate for completing a certain course online.
Currently, once they've finished with the course, their get feed into a spreadsheet.
Then, I need to pull this data (firstname, surname and date of completion) into a PDF framework (certificate for completing the class).
Is there a way you could think of to shorten this process? A program/software/script/anything else that would grab the information from the spreadsheet (or from any other repository of the information) and would throw it on the certification template?
I completed a similar project a few years ago here's the approach I took.
If possible try and get the spreadsheet to come across as a .csv format as it makes the data easier to manipulate. Worst case scenario, convert it yourself, there's a number of examples online.
As for generating the word doc/PDF I'd look at using LaTex (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX) it is used in Academia to create extremely customization documents and allows for easy manipulation of formatting/design based on imported data. There will be some time spent with this approach but it would allow you to build exactly what you're looking for, goodluck!
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I'm building the world's simplest library application. All I want to be able to do is scan in a book's UPC (barcode) using a typical scanner (which just types the numbers of the barcode into a field) and then use it to look up data about the book... at a minimum, title, author, year published, and either the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress catalog number.
The goal is to print out a tiny sticker ("spine label") with the card catalog number that I can stick on the spine of the book, and then I can sort the books by card catalog number on the shelves in our company library. That way books on similar subjects will tend to be near each other, for example, if you know you're looking for a book about accounting, all you have to do is find SOME book about accounting and you'll see the other half dozen that we have right next to it which makes it convenient to browse the library.
There seem to be lots of web APIs to do this, including Amazon and the Library of Congress. But those are all extremely confusing to me. What I really just want is a single higher level function that takes a UPC barcode number and returns some basic data about the book.
There's a very straightforward web based solution over at ISBNDB.com that you may want to look at.
Edit: Updated API documentation link, now there's version 2 available as well
Link to prices and tiers here
You can be up and running in just a few minutes (these examples are from API v1):
register on the site and get a key to use the API
try a URL like:
http://isbndb.com/api/books.xml?access_key={yourkey}&index1=isbn&results=details&value1=9780143038092
The results=details gets additional details including the card catalog number.
As an aside, generally the barcode is the isbn in either isbn10 or isbn13. You just have to delete the last 5 numbers if you are using a scanner and you pick up 18 numbers.
Here's a sample response:
<ISBNdb server_time="2008-09-21T00:08:57Z">
<BookList total_results="1" page_size="10" page_number="1" shown_results="1">
<BookData book_id="the_joy_luck_club_a12" isbn="0143038095">
<Title>The Joy Luck Club</Title>
<TitleLong/>
<AuthorsText>Amy Tan, </AuthorsText>
<PublisherText publisher_id="penguin_non_classics">Penguin (Non-Classics)</PublisherText>
<Details dewey_decimal="813.54" physical_description_text="288 pages" language="" edition_info="Paperback; 2006-09-21" dewey_decimal_normalized="813.54" lcc_number="" change_time="2006-12-11T06:26:55Z" price_time="2008-09-20T23:51:33Z"/>
</BookData>
</BookList>
</ISBNdb>
Note: I'm the LibraryThing guy, so this is partial self-promotion.
Take a look at this StackOverflow answer, which covers some good ways to get data for a given ISBN.
To your issues, Amazon includes a simple DDC (Dewey); Google does not. The WorldCat API does, but you need to be an OCLC library to use it.
The ISBN/UPC issue is complex. Prefer the ISBN, if you can find them. Mass market paperbacks sometimes sport UPCs on the outside and an ISBN on inside.
LibraryThing members have developed a few pages on the issue and on efforts to map the two:
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/UPC
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/CueCat:_ISBNs_and_Barcodes
If you buy from Borders your book's barcodes will all be stickered over with their own internal barcodes (called a "BINC"). Most annoyingly whatever glue they use gets harder and harder to remove cleanly over time. I know of no API that converts them. LibraryThing does it by screenscraping.
For an API, I'd go with Amazon. LibraryThing is a good non-API option, resolving BINCs and adding DDC and LCC for books that don't have them by looking at other editions of the "work."
What's missing is the label part. Someone needs to create a good PDF template for that.
Edit It would be pretty easy if you had ISBN. but converting from UPC to ISBN is not as easy as you'd like.
Here's some javascript code for it from http://isbn.nu where it's done in script
if (indexisbn.indexOf("978") == 0) {
isbn = isbn.substr(3,9);
var xsum = 0;
var add = 0;
var i = 0;
for (i = 0; i < 9; i++) {
add = isbn.substr(i,1);
xsum += (10 - i) * add;
}
xsum %= 11;
xsum = 11 - xsum;
if (xsum == 10) { xsum = "X"; }
if (xsum == 11) { xsum = "0"; }
isbn += xsum;
}
However, that only converts from UPC to ISBN some of the time.
You may want to look at the barcode scanning project page, too - one person's journey to scan books.
So you know about Amazon Web Services. But that assumes amazon has the book and has scanned in the UPC.
You can also try the UPCdatabase at http://www.upcdatabase.com/item/{UPC}, but this is also incomplete - at least it's growing..
The library of congress database is also incomplete with UPCs so far (although it's pretty comprehensive), and is harder to get automated.
Currently, it seems like you'd have to write this yourself in order to have a high-level lookup that returns simple information (and tries each service)
Sounds like the sort of job one might get a small software company to do for you...
More seriously, there are services that provide an interface to the ISBN catalog, www.literarymarketplace.com.
On worldcat.com, you can create a URL using the ISBN that will take you straight to a book detail page. That page isn't as very useful because it's still HTML scraping to get the data, but they have a link to download the book data in a couple "standard" formats.
For example, their demo book: http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/9780060817084
Has a "EndNote" format download link http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/123348009?page=endnote&client=worldcat.org-detailed_record, and you can harvest the data from that file very easily. That's linked from their own OCLC number, not the ISBN, but the scrape to convert that isn't hard, and they may yet have a good interface to do it.
My librarian wife uses http://www.worldcat.org/, but they key off ISBN. If you can scan that, you're golden. Looking at a few books, it looks like the UPC is the same or related to the ISBN.
Oh, these guys have a function for doing the conversion from UPC to ISBN.
Using the web site Library Thing, you can scan in your barcodes (the entire barcode, not just the ISBN - if you have a scanning "wedge" you're in luck) and build your library. (It is an excellent social network - think StackOverflow for book enthusiasts.)
Then, using the TOOLS section, you can export your library. Now you have a text file to import/parse and can create your labels, a card catalog, etc.
I'm afraid the problem is database access. Companies pay to have a UPC assigned and so the database isn't freely accessible. The UPCdatabase site mentioned by Philip is a start, as is UPCData.info, but they're user entered--which means incomplete and possibly inaccurate.
You can always enter in the UPC to Google and get a hit, but that's not very automated. But it does get it right most of the time.
I thought I remembered Jon Udell doing something like this (e.g., see this), but it was purely ISBN based.
Looks like you've found a new project for someone to work on!
If you're wanting to use Amazon you can implement it easily with LINQ to Amazon.
Working in the library world we simply connect to the LMS pass in the barcode and hey presto back comes the data. I believe there are a number of free LMS providers - Google for "open source lms".
Note: This probably works off ISBN...
You can find a PHP implemented ISBN lookup tool at Dawson Interactive.
I frequently recommend using Amazon's Product Affiliate API (check it out here https://affiliate-program.amazon.com), however there are a few other options available as well.
If you want to guarantee the accuracy of the data, you can go with the a paid solution. GS1 is the organization that issues UPC codes, so their information should always be accurate (https://www.gs1us.org/tools/gs1-company-database-gepir).
There are also a number of third party databases with relevant information such as https://www.upccodesearch.com/ or https://www.upcdatabase.com/ .