Success Story #2

The Customer

Renault F1 Team, one of the top Formula 1 racing car teams.

The Problem

Automotive engineers use Microsoft® Word to author very complex technical reports containing hundreds of measured or calculated values and dozens specialized graphs.

In order to create such reports, an engineer

has to collect data from various databases using various applications,
has to do calculations in Microsoft® Excel,
has convert his report to PDF and then, using Adobe® Acrobat®, has to aggregate the resulting PDF with the specialized graphs output by an automatic report generator.

Creating the reports this way is time-consuming, tedious and error prone.

The Solution

Replace Microsoft® Word by XMLmind XML Editor associated to an advanced configuration that turns it into a highly specialized report editor.

At the heart of this custom configuration, a general purpose, simple, flexible report document type, but with two highly specialized elements: measure and graph.

The measure element has a formula attribute which can be used to specify any measured or computed value.

The graph element has a specification child element. This child element specifies what is to be plotted, using Renault F1 Team proprietary plotting language.

A custom command is used to ``bind'' the document being edited to the data found in the various databases. After binding the document to one or more data sources, the views of measure elements display the actual measured or computed values and the views of graph elements display the actual graphs. See screenshots below.

The Implementation

Task	Cost (days)
Create an XMLmind XML Editor configuration file declaring all the components below and defining a custom menu, a custom toolbar and a number of custom macro-commands.	2
Create a W3C XML Schema for Renault F1 Team reports.	2
Create a CSS style sheet used to render a report on screen.	2
Create an XSLT style sheet used to convert the report to HTML.	2
Create another XSLT style sheet used to convert the report to PDF and to RTF.	2
Develop many custom commands written in the Java^TM programming language, most commands making use of custom dialog boxes (10,000 lines of Java^TM). Example: the command used to insert or modify a `measure` element and its formula editor.	10
Total cost:	20

Using XMLmind XML Editor to create Renault F1 Team reports works as follows:

Start XMLmind XML Editor, use File|New, choose the template for a Renault F1 Team report.
Because the document being edited is not yet bound to data, the measure elements are represented by the start of their formula attributes, displayed in gray.
Use custom menu item Rapport|Déclarer Essais (Report|Declare Tests in French) to ``bind data'' to the document being edited. A specialized browser (not represented), is used to select the data files found on a central Web server.
After doing this, the ``grayed'' formulas are replaced by the measured or computed values, which are displayed in magenta.
Similarly, graph placeholders are replaced by miniature views of the actual (A4-sized) graphs.
The engineer now has to check what has been automatically generated, to fill in the blanks, and probably to add a few more paragraphs and an few more measure elements.
Note that the XML document created this way is a ``normal'' one. That is, it is self contained (it can be opened off-line). It can be saved anywhere on disk. It can be reopened to be modified at will.
Use custom menu item Rapport|Publier (Report|Publish in French) in order to (in a single step):
- save a copy of the report (XML format) to a shared folder, automatically created in the right place, with the right name,
- convert the report to HTML and copy the generated HTML to the shared folder,
- convert the report to PDF and copy the generated PDF to the shared folder.

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