Introduction

Producing sophisticated, consistent and personalized documents is one of the most common challenges when building business software. The output may be a simple one-page form letter, an invoice or a complex report with hundreds of pages.

Template based document automation is the next generation of word processing applications. Every document is based on a template, which can be created by a designer. This ensures that all documents produced by one company, conform to the company's corporate identity and are completely consistent across all departments. Templates can be merged with data from different data sources and can even be personalized for individual recipients or sender.

The TX Template Designer has been created to develop and design these templates. It can be used to insert specific fields into a document, which are later merged by a server-side application. A database can be connected to the document, which allows individual fields to be easily inserted.

The TX Template Designer can be used to insert MS Word fields of type MERGEFIELD. The specific field name must be used in the server-side application to merge the data. This means that the template will not save the database name, nor the selected table of the database. The database, which is open in the TX Template Designer is only available to assist designers to insert the proper fields into the template. The template itself does not save any logic or further information except the format of the field. The complete logic and the database name must be integrated into the end-user server-side application.