Markdown Reporter

On the APEX connect 2016 in Berlin I talked about my APEX Markdown plugin and fine art printing with the help of Pandoc and LaTeX. When I was preparing my slides and documenting a SQL query in a Markdown code block I asked myself:

What, if the database is taking this Markdown code block and runs the query inside to convert it into data?

And what, if I take this Markdown text with the data in the code blocks and post it to a small webservice which converts the data blocks into charts and the whole document into HTML or a LaTeX based PDF?

The idea to Markdown Reporter was born.

I talked about this project on the DOAG conference in Nuremberg last November. Here are the slides (in german, sorry).

If you want to know how it looks like - here is a PDF demo report

The implementation has three main components:

• An Oracle PL/SQL Package for preprocessing your data and communicating with the printserver
• A Node.js based printserver, which is in fact a web based remote shell for the format converter Pandoc
• A Pandoc filter written in Python, which intercepts the converting process and generates the charts based on the preprocessed CSV data with the help of Pythons matplotlib

The HTML and PDF output is complete vector based and all used tools are open source.

You can find the sources and more informations on GitHub.

Happy reporting :-)

Ottmar