On May 10-11 2017, the Magdeburger Developer Days are taking place the second time in Magdeburg, Germany. In 40+ sessions, top speakers talk about .NET, Java, web technologies, databases and ALM. Our MVP André Krämer is giving a talk about cross-platform app development.

As one of the main sponsors, we are also sponsoring the attendee badges. And of course, these badges are created with Text Control Reporting. In this article, we would like to explain how easy it is to create fully-featured conference badges with TX Text Control.

The badges should have two sides and will be folded in the middle to fit into the double-sided badge holders. Both sides should have a sponsor logo, the attendee name, the attendee vCard information encoded in a QR Code and a badge number. The QR Code allows attendees an easy exchange of contact information simply by scanning the code using their smartphones.

The template consists of a table with 2 columns with the exact required height for the badge. Each column represents a side of the badge and therefore contains data from the same data row. Additionally, it contains the merge fields for the name, ticket type and badge number. The QR Code contains the encoded vCard information.

This complete table will be converted into a merge block that gets repeated for all attendees in the data source.

The following is an excerpt of the XML data source. The name of the repeating block is attendee that holds the data for each badge instance:

<badges>
        <badge>
                <attendee>
                        <name>Chris Dumont</name>
                        <ticketType>Mo - Di</ticketType>
                        <barcode>
                                BEGIN:VCARD
                                VERSION:2.1
                                FN:Chris Dumont
                                N:Dumont;Chris
                                EMAIL;WORK;
                                ORG:ACME Inc.
                                END:VCARD
                        </barcode>
                        <number>1221</number>
                </attendee>
                <attendee>
                        <name>Paul Klausen</name>
                        <ticketType>Mo - Di</ticketType>
                        <barcode>
                                BEGIN:VCARD
                                VERSION:2.1
                                FN:Paul Klausen
                                N:Klausen;Paul
                                EMAIL;WORK;
                                ORG:ACME Inc.
                                END:VCARD
                        </barcode>
                        <number>1231</number>
                </attendee>
        </badge>
</badges>

Merging this template results in perfectly sized, print-ready badges:

If you plan to attend this conference, the ticket sales open March 1st.

See you in Magdeburg!