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Feature Request FR-3559
Product Area APIs
Status DELIVERED

17 Voters

Create a word or pdf document

roberto.capancioni Public · Dec 19 2023

Idea Summary
The question is not new! APEX is awesome but can't print an invoice!

There are several good third party tools but they are too expensive for many use cases (5k-15k EUR or USD software development). Sometimes an application needs ONLY ONE document type to print.
Furthermore, customers are disappointed when they learn that it is not "simple" to print a document and it is the first thing that needs to be told to them if they do not know APEX

Here an example of a small package that can create word document.

http://zt-tech.eu/download.html

Here a PDF

https://github.com/lee-lindley/PdfGen

with the famous as_pdf3 by Anton Scheffer

This has been delivered in Oracle APEX 24.1!

Known Duplicates

Known duplicates

FR-3567
FR-3567 report builder

Comments

Comments

  • jayson hanes Admin OP 1.5 years ago

    Why not just use the code you are aware of for this purpose yourself? There are several 3rd party options for printing that are very cost effective and/or free:

    https://apexofficeprint.com

    https://www.jaspersoft.com/

  • roberto.capancioni OP 1.5 years ago

    Hi Jayson,

    AOP is a commercial tool; its cost starts from 3.5k EUR/customer + 20%/yr/customer maintenance.

    My average project is 10k-15k/customer; it's not a choice for me or for other developers in several use cases.

    Jasper is a Do-it-yourself solution. I'm a developer and sell applications in OCI environment, not middleware. Who maintains the Jasper Report Server?

    I use the packages I suggested, but they are high-code solutions.

    I believe that many developers (and customers) would be happy to be able to use even a minimal but low-code solution to create Word or PDF documents.

  • jayson hanes Admin OP 1.5 years ago

    But just because there is “code out there” doesn't mean we can just grab it and add it into the product. We'd have to follow a lot of red-tape to replicate something that is already out there.

    btw, AOP is really cheap from their price guide.. how many reports are you talking about generating per month?

  • roberto.capancioni OP 1.5 years ago

    My idea is to raise a question not to provide a solution. The packages mentioned are an example of what can be done with so little code.

    I don't think AOP is the solution for the community. It's the solution for a customer.

    Developers want to own a tool one time for all, and not to pay a license for every customer.

    But if no one is interested, it's ok for me.

  • jlam OP 1.4 years ago

    I couldn't agree more for this ask.  APEX is absolutely a wonderful tool and I recommend this to all of my clients' app building needs.  But if there is any use case for these one off high fidelity printing, we hit a wall with out of the box solution.  We really need a BI Publisher “light” version to do just this if APEX can come seeded one that can be used to generate PDF, Word, Excel and other output format.  Thanks

  • lascanio OP 1.4 years ago

    I can add that is this feature, something that give us a low code to and faster way to develop and provide formatted report to our clients. Other tools are not options for our budget.

  • radwan.salamehh OP 1.1 years ago

    Great idea. I hope we will have it very soon.

  • jayson hanes Admin OP 1.1 years ago

    This past March, Menno posted this blog covering an APEX sample app that works with the OCI DocGen service: https://blogs.oracle.com/database/post/announcing-the-oracle-apex-sample-document-generator-app

    This is the future of printing in APEX.

  • roberto.capancioni OP 1.1 years ago

    So the future of printing in APEX is the use of an external service in the Oracle Cloud.
    From my point of view it means no printing functionality.

  • jayson hanes Admin OP 1.1 years ago

    We appreciate your feedback, @roberto.capancioni but not everything can be free right, finding middle ground is always a challenge.

  • roberto.capancioni OP 1.1 years ago

    That's fine with me, I have my workarounds. You can take this post as feedback from a nobody: Document Generator Pre-built Function, is not the solution.

  • lascanio OP 1.1 years ago

    @roberto.capancioni  if you dont mind, what workaround you use right now.

  • roberto.capancioni OP 1.1 years ago

    sometimes I use http://zt-tech.eu/download.html for small applications

    for bigger projects I use

    https://eclipse-birt.github.io/birt-website/

  • roberto.capancioni OP 1 years ago

    First production use of the new feature, if you are in the cloud it is definitely convenient to use!

  • shyamngr OP 12 months ago

    I also request  in-built reporting tools must be available in Oracle APEX.  All the other tools are providing the same. so it is easy to provide the solution to customers rather research the new reporting tool.

  • michel.vogelpoel OP 9 months ago

    I used the alexandria packages to create word documents using apex, I wrote two blogs about it. In the second blog I was able to create simple table's in the word document.
    My colleage was even able to adjust the code to integrate images ( no blog exist of this yet ). 

    https://www.houseoftalents.nl/integrationapplicationtalents/blog/integratie-van-word-met-de-oracle-database
    https://www.houseoftalents.nl/integrationapplicationtalents/blog/integrating-plsql-table-records-word