senaite.impress 1.0.0.post1

Publication of HTML/PDF Reports in SENAITE

Publication of HTML/PDF Reports in SENAITE

About

SENAITE IMPRESS is basically a rendering engine for HTML documents to PDF. It supports any kind of international paperformat with their corresponding paper dimensions, portrait and landscape orientation and merging of multiple PDFs to one document.

Installation

Please follow the installations instructions for Plone 4 and senaite.lims.

To install SENAITE IMPRESS, you have to add senaite.impress into the eggs list inside the [buildout] section of your buildout.cfg:

[buildout]
parts =
    instance
extends =
    http://dist.plone.org/release/4.3.17/versions.cfg
find-links =
    http://dist.plone.org/release/4.3.17
    http://dist.plone.org/thirdparty
eggs =
    Plone
    Pillow
    senaite.lims
    senaite.impress
zcml =
eggs-directory = ${buildout:directory}/eggs

[instance]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
user = admin:admin
http-address = 0.0.0.0:8080
eggs =
    ${buildout:eggs}
zcml =
    ${buildout:zcml}

[versions]
setuptools =
zc.buildout =

Note

The above example works for the buildout created by the unified installer. If you however have a custom buildout you might need to add the egg to the eggs list in the [instance] section rather than adding it in the [buildout] section.

Also see this section of the Plone documentation for further details: https://docs.plone.org/4/en/manage/installing/installing_addons.html

Important

For the changes to take effect you need to re-run buildout from your console:

bin/buildout

Installation Requirements

The following versions are required for SENAITE IMPRESS:

• Plone 4.3.17
• senaite.core >= 1.2.7
• senaite.lims >= 1.2.0

Activate the Add-on

Please browse to the Add-ons Controlpanel and activate the SENAITE IMPRESS Add-on:

SENAITE IMPRESS replaced now the built-in publication engine and will open automatically when you publish an Analysis Request.

You can also safely deactivate this Plugin to switch back to the old publication engine.

Usage

SENAITE IMPRESS is a drop in replacement for the current publication backend in SENAITE CORE. After the Add-on has been installed, it will open automatically when an Analysis Request is published, prepublished or repupublished.

The above screenshot shows 4 Analysis Requests in the workflow state "Verified". Select them and click the "Publish" Button.

The SENAITE IMPRESS preview allows you to change the report template, paperformat and the orientation.

The "merge" checkbox creates a single PDF, even when no multi-template was selected.

The button "Save" will do the following actions:

• Generate the PDF and store it below the corresponding Analysis Request
• Redirect to the "Analysis Reports" view of the customer
• Keep the current Workflow state (Publication is only done by sending the Email)

The button "Email" will do the same actions as "Save", but redirects directly to the Email view.

Analysis Reports Listing View

A new tab Analysis Reports will be available for Clients, which lists all generated PDF reports for all Analysis Requests of this client. Reports can be selected in this listing for email delivery. This also allows to send multiple PDF Analysis Reports in a single Email.

Selecting one or more Reports allows to send the generated PDFs to the selected contacts of the Analysis Request.

If the Email was successfully sent, the corresponding Analysis Requests change the state to "Published".

After you clicked the "Send" button, the Email with the attched reports are delivered to the selected recipients.

The workflow states of the Analysis Requests have changed their state to "Published".

Note

In the case that multiple Analysis Requests are rendered in a single Report, the contained Analysis Requests are also published when this Report was send.

Custom Reports

Most of the labs require custom reports and SENAITE IMPRESS allows you to do that with relative ease.

The following sections will guide you through the process of creating a custom report.

You can also contact a SENAITE service provider for a professional solution:

https://www.senaite.com/#providers

Hello World

The easiest way to get started with senaite.impress is to copy one of the existing templates in the templates/reports folder within this package.

The smallest report example looks like this:

<h1>Hello World!</h1>

It renders a heading saying “Hello, world!” on the report.

The next few sections will gradually introduce you to using senaite.impress. We will examine single- and multi reports, Zope page templates and the report model. Once you master them, you can create complex reports for SENAITE.

Single/Multi Reports

The difference between single- and multi reports is that a single reports receive a single report object, while multi reports receive a collection of report objects.

senaite.impress uses the report name to distinguish between a single- and multi report. A report starting or ending with the workd Multi, e.g. MultiReport.pt or PublicationReportMulti.pt will be considered as a multi report and it will receive all selected objects in a collection.

All other reports, e.g. Default.pt, HelloWorld.pt, SingleReport.pt will be considered as single reports and it will receive the single report as its model.

The most basic single report looks like this:

<tal:report define="model python:view.model;">
  <h1 tal:content="model/id">This will be replaced with the ID of the model</h1>
</tal:report>

It renders the ID of the model (in this case the Analysis Request H2O-0001-R01) on the report.

To render a multi report, we need to copy the previous template to MultiHelloWorld.pt.

The most basic multi report looks like this:

<tal:report define="collection python:view.collection;">
  <tal:model tal:repeat="model collection">
    <h1 tal:content="model/id">This will be replaced with the ID of the model</h1>
  </tal:model>
</tal:report>

It renders the IDs of the model (in this case the Analysis Requests H2O-0001-R01 and H2O-0002-R01) on the same report.

Change between the templates HelloWorld.pt and MultiHelloWorld.pt to see how the two selected Analysis Requests render either on two pages or on one page.

Zope Page Templates

Zope Page Templates is the main web page generation tool in SENAITE.

Page Templates are recommended way to generate reports in senaite.impress. We have already seen a small example how to use the Template Attribute Language (TAL). TAL consists of special tag attributes. For example, we used a dynamic page headline in the previous reports:

<h1 tal:content="model/id">This will be replaced with the ID of the model</h1>

Report Model

The Report Model is a special wrapper object for database objects in SENAITE. The advantage of Report Models is that they provide transparent access to all content schema fields in a preformance optimized way.

For example the content type Analysis Request in SENAITE defines a computed field SampleTypeTitle: https://github.com/senaite/senaite.core/blob/master/bika/lims/content/analysisrequest.py#L1548

To access this field in a report, you simply traverse it by name:

<tal:report define="model python:view.model;">
  <h1 tal:content="model/id">This will be replaced with the ID of the model</h1>
  <h2>
    Sample Type:
    <span tal:content="model/SampleTypeTitle">
      This will be replaced with the Sample Type Title
    </span>
  </h2>
</tal:report>

Now it should render the title of the sample type below the ID of the Analysis Request:

Bootstrap

senaite.impress uses Bootstrap 4 as the main front-end component library. Each report will therefore follow these style guidelines and can be easily extended.

Please note, that you should start with Rows as the top level HTML element inside a report to maintain the borders of the selected paper format.

<tal:report define="model python:view.model;">
  <div class="row">
    <div class="col-sm-12">
      <h1 tal:content="model/id">This will be replaced with the ID of the model</h1>
      <h2>
        Sample Type:
        <span class="text-secondary"
              tal:content="model/SampleTypeTitle">
          This will be replaced with the Sample Type Title
        </span>
      </h2>
    </div>
  </div>
</tal:report>

Customizing the report design

To customize the style of your report, it is recommended to add the CSS style inline.

<tal:report define="model python:view.model;">

  <tal:css define="laboratory view/laboratory;">
    <style type="text/css">
     html, body { font-size: 1em; }
     h1 { font-size: 160%; }
     h2 { font-size: 120%; }
     @page {
       font-size: 9pt;
       @top-left {
         content: '<span tal:omit-tag="" tal:content="laboratory/Name"/>';
       }
       @top-right {
         content: "<tal:t i18n:translate=''>Page</tal:t> " counter(page) " <tal:t i18n:translate=''>of</tal:t> " counter(pages);
       }
     }
    </style>
  </tal:css>

  <div class="row">
    <div class="col-sm-12">
      <h1 tal:content="model/id">This will be replaced with the ID of the model</h1>
      <h2>
        Sample Type:
        <span class="text-secondary"
              tal:content="model/SampleTypeTitle">
          This will be replaced with the Sample Type Title
        </span>
      </h2>
    </div>
  </div>
</tal:report>

Please also see the Paged media CSS properties to learn how to control the presentation of content for print or any other media that splits content into discrete pages.

Report View

The Report View acts as a controller for the multi- and single reports. It provides code logic to group, sort and extract the data of the report model/collection.

Methods (functions) of the Report view are referenced by the keyword view in the template and provide the business controller logic between the plain data object and SENAITE LIMS/HEALTH.

Report views can be customized per report for any specific report behavior and model.

The standard report view for models of the type Analysis Request is located here: https://github.com/senaite/senaite.impress/blob/master/src/senaite/impress/analysisrequest/reportview.py

However, as Python code know-how is needed to change report views, it is recommend that a Professional SENAITE Service Provider is consulted for commercial support.

<tal:report define="model python:view.model;">

  <tal:css define="laboratory view/laboratory;">
    <style type="text/css">
     html, body { font-size: 1em; }
     h1 { font-size: 160%; }
     h2 { font-size: 120%; }
     @page {
       font-size: 9pt;
       @top-left {
         content: '<span tal:omit-tag="" tal:content="laboratory/Name"/>';
       }
       @top-right {
         content: "<tal:t i18n:translate=''>Page</tal:t> " counter(page) " <tal:t i18n:translate=''>of</tal:t> " counter(pages);
       }
     }
    </style>
  </tal:css>

  <div class="row">
    <div class="col-sm-12">
      <h1 tal:content="model/id">This will be replaced with the ID of the model</h1>
      <h2>
        Sample Type:
        <span class="text-secondary"
              tal:content="model/SampleTypeTitle">
          This will be replaced with the Sample Type Title
        </span>
      </h2>
      <hr class="py-1"/>
      <div class="text-muted font-italic">
        Published <span tal:content="python:view.to_localized_time(model.DatePublished)"/>
        by <span tal:content="python:view.current_user.get('fullname')"/>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</tal:report>

Reports in external packages

Until now we created all reports on the file system within this package, which is not the recommended way, because with future updates of senaite.impress, these changes will be lost.

Therefore it is recommended to create a new SENAITE Add-On Package and put the custom reports in there.

In your new package configure.zcml you have to specify the folder where your reports live:

<configure
    xmlns="http://namespaces.zope.org/zope"
    xmlns:plone="http://namespaces.plone.org/plone">

  <!-- Report resource directory -->
  <plone:static
      directory="reports"
      type="senaite.impress.reports"/>

</configure>

This will integrate the reports directory within your package into the search path of senaite.impress.

Further Reading

senaite.impress comes with some default templates included. It is recommended to read the code of these templates or use them as the base for new reports.

senaite.impress:Default.pt

This page template is renders single reports (one AR per report).

senaite.impress:MultiDefault.pt

This page template is renders multiple reports on one report. The header and footer will be rendered only once. The metadata of the first model (here the Analysis Request H20-0001-R01) will be used for these sections and the results/remarks/attachments sections will be repeated for all models in the collection (H20-0001-R01 and H20-0002-R01).

senaite.impress:MultiDefaultByColumn.pt

This page template behaves like the senaite.impress:MultiDefault.pt, except that the results of all models (Analysis Requests) will be rendered in columns side by side.

1.0.0 (2018-06-23)

• Initial Release