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The actual functionality (wherein a user defines document templates in the system) could be reused for many other related Tasks tasks like SMS Integration (https://mifosforge.jira.com/browse/MIFOSX-119), E-mail integration etc.
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We would ideally want a user to select an Entity (Only Clients and Loan for the first cut) .and associate documents against it using a very simple workflow
A user would have a layout like the one shown below with
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Clients would work as a “simple” entity (as in a user selects a "client and defines Templates for documents against the Client" as an entity and then associates a document Template against it)
Loans would work as a “Compound” entity (That is a user would also have to select a particular Loan product for associating templates against them, as Contracts . Since contracts etc. could vary from one Product to another)
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Initially we could have two types of placeholders
- Simple Placeholders (That generate Text Content): They That would be replaced by the Text value the placeholder represents
Ex: ${clientName} would be replaced by “Andy Jones” etc
- Complex Placeholder Placeholders (That generate HTML Mark-up): They would be used primarily for generating Tabular Data.
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Ideally, we would have a parser at the server side (Java) which would replace the placeholders with context sensitive data and then serve HTML reports to the Client.
Alternatively, we could also have services at the server side that exposes the context sensitive data and a Client side parser that would take care of merging the report template with the actual values exposed from by the RESTful service
3 Database changes
We could store the HTML templates directly in the database (as they would be quite small and of very limited numbers)
Table: “m_user_documents”
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