E
Ed
Hello,
I realize I am working within an architecture that will immediately be
identified as less than ideal, but it is the one that I am stuck with. Here
is the general outline of my problem. I work for a University which uses
Peoplesoft 8 to store and manage student data. We would like to give
prospective students the option to submit their application essays online,
but so far we have not been able to implement a solution which allows us to
retain formatting when we retrieve the document for printing. This is a
dealbreaker, since it is imperative that students essays (we cannot
realistically control what application they are created in, nor how the
prospect works within that application in order to format text), be
accurately represented when they are retrieved for review by our admissions
board.
Under our current setup, it is no surprise that we lose formatiing. The
test environment uses a delivered peoplesoft interface to accept copy/pasted
text from word and then inserts it using a native Peoplesoft function. When
we retrieve the record and try to print it (again, all from within
Peoplesoft) we lost paragraph breaks and line endings, to say the least.
The task is to create a web form which can massage the data (or accept it
via another method than copy/paste) and trigger an SQL insert into the same
table that Peoplesoft hooks to normally. The SQL part is not that hard. It
is getting the formatting to carry over. I have read a little that perhaps
saving the Word doc as .rtf prior to cutting and pasting may help, but I
assume there are better ways.
If it were up to me (it's not), I would rather not be trying to store the
docs in the db at all, but writing them to a directory and storing a
reference to the file in the db, so that all we were doing was moving docs
around without having to worry about conversion (this would also help deal
with the fact that although 90% of input will come from Word, not all will),
but for reasons too tedious to go into here, this is not an option.
We are also tied to classic .asp on the web app end. Given all of that,
does anyone have any idea if this can even be accomplished with any degree of
consistency. I have been doing web app development for about six years, and
have had to deal with Word formatting issues over and over, but this is
slightly different, as I can massage the data prior to input using .asp or
vb, but I am tied to retrieving it via SQR and Peoplesoft.
I am extremely curious to know whether or not anyone thinks this is possible.
Thanks for reading.
I realize I am working within an architecture that will immediately be
identified as less than ideal, but it is the one that I am stuck with. Here
is the general outline of my problem. I work for a University which uses
Peoplesoft 8 to store and manage student data. We would like to give
prospective students the option to submit their application essays online,
but so far we have not been able to implement a solution which allows us to
retain formatting when we retrieve the document for printing. This is a
dealbreaker, since it is imperative that students essays (we cannot
realistically control what application they are created in, nor how the
prospect works within that application in order to format text), be
accurately represented when they are retrieved for review by our admissions
board.
Under our current setup, it is no surprise that we lose formatiing. The
test environment uses a delivered peoplesoft interface to accept copy/pasted
text from word and then inserts it using a native Peoplesoft function. When
we retrieve the record and try to print it (again, all from within
Peoplesoft) we lost paragraph breaks and line endings, to say the least.
The task is to create a web form which can massage the data (or accept it
via another method than copy/paste) and trigger an SQL insert into the same
table that Peoplesoft hooks to normally. The SQL part is not that hard. It
is getting the formatting to carry over. I have read a little that perhaps
saving the Word doc as .rtf prior to cutting and pasting may help, but I
assume there are better ways.
If it were up to me (it's not), I would rather not be trying to store the
docs in the db at all, but writing them to a directory and storing a
reference to the file in the db, so that all we were doing was moving docs
around without having to worry about conversion (this would also help deal
with the fact that although 90% of input will come from Word, not all will),
but for reasons too tedious to go into here, this is not an option.
We are also tied to classic .asp on the web app end. Given all of that,
does anyone have any idea if this can even be accomplished with any degree of
consistency. I have been doing web app development for about six years, and
have had to deal with Word formatting issues over and over, but this is
slightly different, as I can massage the data prior to input using .asp or
vb, but I am tied to retrieving it via SQR and Peoplesoft.
I am extremely curious to know whether or not anyone thinks this is possible.
Thanks for reading.