Convert Xlate to Excel Spreadsheet for documentation?

[Jennifer Hardesty]

We are having to do a lot of documentation for a massive conversion to an Enterprise system.  We’re being asked for detailed interface specs (down to the fields) on each and every one of our interfaces, and, sadly, this was not considered a priority or necessary previously.  

Also, regretably our team is temporarily severely understaffed so I’m looking for solutions to help make the work easier and more efficient.

Has anyone managed to convert/dump/parse Xlate files into Excel Spreadsheets or similar for documentation purposes?

What about NetConfig into Excel?  What about NetConfig into Visio or Word?

Thanks in advance!

Topic

[garry r fisher]

Hi,

Have you asked Lawson? They used to do tool that documents Cloverleaf – It wasn’t cheap mind.

The alternative is to parse netconfig yourself and extract the data and build your own documentation. I think there are some tcl scripts in one of the user contributed or unsupported directories that do the basics of this. They allow you to parse netconfig – not build odcumentation. But they could be used as a starter. Sorry to be vague but it’s a few years since I looked at them and they were always unsupported ‘just in case’ the format of netconfig changed.

I don’t work with Clovelreaf at the moment so I can’t even look for you.

Hope this helps

Garry

[Bob Richardson]

Greetings,

Unfortunately, keyed structures like NetConfigs change with each Release (or could change).  There are promised (at least at CUE11) changes to add widgets to do documentation from the IDE.

Ok… as you state your shop is severly understaffed right now, I would appeal to your management to hire some temporary help with the expertise to assist your group with documentation.  To put some people to work especially in our current economic situation.

Going forward, our shop enforces the policy of making the application owners of interfaces create and maintain the documentation:  master spreadsheets with record layouts, filter requirements, mapping specs, tables with contents and rules.  And execption logic (which we invariably code in TCL programs).  Perhaps your leadership may consider putting the onus on the owners as they request these services from your group?

Sorry I cannot be more helpful here  – we Cloverleaf folks have cranked up logic from time to time for ad hoc documentation requests but they rely on configuration steps like using the thread groups attributes to identify interfaces by application.

Make an appeal to your leadership for more troops albeit temporary.

My thoughts for you in getting to done here!!

[Jennifer Hardesty]

Bob Richardson wrote:

Greetings,

Make an appeal to your leadership for more troops albeit temporary.

We have openings, are you looking to relocate?  😈   Trust me, they are aware of the need.  We have lost two of our valuable team members to elsewhere while we were searching for two more as we ramped up for a huge new project.  This leaves us with two.

We’ll be getting someone trained in Epic Bridges to help with some of that work in the next few weeks, but we need trained Cloverleaf programmers like last month, you know?  And management is aware and just as frustrated as we are.   😕

Which is why I’m looking for simpler, easier methods of doing the tedious things.  (Plus, I’ve always had a theory that the best programmers are lazy programmers because we only want to do things one time so we find a way to make repetitive processes self-functioning.)

[Tim Gobbel]

I know I got this from this listserv but I can not find it to give credit where credit is due.  I CERTAINLY am not this smart.  It may not do what you want but maybe you can glean something more from it.  This tcl proc turns the NetConfig file into an XML page.  I am including the instructions for use as well.  HTH!

[Tim Gobbel]

the first file is the clovertech list write up.

[John Parker]

The other attachments were posted just fine but the netconfig.xsl somehow did not make the trip.

Can you repost please?  I think this will be very helpful for a documentation project we are working on.

Thank you in advance.

John Parker

Linux Adminstrator

Oconee Medical Center

Seneca, SC

[Tim Gobbel]

sorry, i do that ALOT!  i have edited the last post and included the .xsl file.  Thanx!

[Rehman Masood]

I wrote something that converts xlt to html if that helps.

[James Cobane]

Rehman,

I would be interested in your xlt to html utility; can you post it?

Thanks,

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Author]

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