Markdown Reporter

2017-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

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</a> (in german, sorry).

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

The implementation has three main components:

An Oracle PL/SQL Package for preprocessing your data and communicating with the printserver</li>

A Node.js based printserver, which is in fact a web based remote shell for the format converter Pandoc</a></li>
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</a></li> </ul>
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</a>.
Happy reporting :-)
Ottmar

Ottmar’s Notes - Matplotlib

Markdown Reporter