Tools Archives

Generate PDF, Word, or RTF Documents from a Mobile App

December 13, 2016/in Mobile, Software, Tools /by David McGahey

Need to empower mobile users to capture information and generate a document or report from any remote location? MobileTogether lets you build a cross-platform mobile app to do that. You can tailor the app with all the device-specific mobile controls users expect, like check boxes, date pickers, switches and buttons, yet generate output files identical to an existing document, form, or report already familiar throughout the enterprise.

The Actions Dialog in the MobileTogether Designer lets developers define a Print To action to generate PDF, Word, or RTF documents from a mobile app. Once a document is rendered, it is saved on the mobile client for further processing. For instance, a PDF file could be emailed as a file attachment.

Generate PDF, Word, or RTF Documents from a Mobile App

Database Features Across the Altova Product Line

December 1, 2016/in Applications, Tools /by David McGahey

We have written previously about database features like SQL Merge for data integration, and summarized database features in the latest release. But if you’ve only used one or two Altova products, you may not be aware of the powerful support for working with relational databases is provided throughout Altova’s tightly-integrated tools.

Database features across the Altova product line

The Altova MissionKit and MobileTogether products include SQL database features with rich functionality for database-related tasks, supporting all major relational databases in their native interface languages.

Learn About Inline XBRL and XBRL Taxonomy Packages

November 29, 2016/in Software, Tools, XBRL /by Erin Cavanaugh

As adoption of the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) for financial reporting increases worldwide, new standards are emerging to meet the needs of filing companies and developers alike. Altova’s line of XBRL-enabled products supports a wide-range of XBRL standards and is updated frequently as new specifications emerge.

Let’s take a closer look at two of the newer XBRL standards – Inline XBRL and XBRL Taxonomy Packages – and explore how they work.

Corporate buildings

Automated Testing for Mobile App Development

November 22, 2016/in Development, Mobile, Software, Tools /by David McGahey

Robust and repeatable testing improves any software development project. If you’re creating a mobile app, testing is especially critical given the unpredictable range of end user devices and location variables. Altova MobileTogether includes sophisticated Automated Testing features that let developers:

Record a series of user actions as a test case
Replay the test case in the MobileTogether Designer Simulator environment
Deploy test cases to the MobileTogether Server for replay on a variety of client devices
Retrieve Test Run results from the server and compare differences

Automated Testing for Mobile Apps

You can even modify the app to fix a bug and run the test case again to validate the results of changes, which makes this an indispensable QA tool for your mobile app development process.

MapForce Supports SQL Merge When It’s the Right Tool for the Job

November 1, 2016/in Data Integration, Tools /by David McGahey

Large database tables can easily contain a million, even hundreds of millions of rows of data. Database administrators and others charged with maintaining such large datasets are always concerned about execution time for ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) operations, updates, and other SQL queries. To make these operations more efficient, some — but not all — database vendors implemented a SQL merge statement to insert or update rows of an existing table as a single bulk-insert statement rather than requiring individual statements for each row.

Altova MapForce automatically supports SQL merge when it is available for the target database. Let’s look at an example.

shutterstock_66084286

MapForce Offers Dynamic Access to Node Names

October 13, 2016/in Data Integration, Tools /by David McGahey

There are situations, especially when encountering loosely structured data, where you may want to map and transform structural components of a data stream along with content. MapForce 2017 includes a new feature to dynamically access node names of XML elements, attributes, or text file columns such as the contents of CSV files, to target components.

Dynamic access to node names allows creation on the fly of target elements and attributes whose names do not need to be known beforehand or specifically identified in the data mapping. This feature lets you create much more generic, flexible, and reusable mappings that require less manual intervention if data models evolve.

News about Dynamic Access to Node Names in MapForce 2017

XML Editor Text View Gets a Big Update

October 11, 2016/in Development, Tools, XML /by Erin Cavanaugh

Starting with Version 2017, XMLSpy developers will have access to some new, time-saving productivity tools in their favorite XML editor, including a modernized Find/Replace dialog, an easy way to select all occurrences of a particular string, and a shortcut for finding a parent element.

I was amazed how much time and effort these new tools saved me right away – let’s take a look, and I’ll show you how.

News about XML find / replace

Tags: Text View, XML Editor, XMLSpy