HTML from English

The HTML from English feature allows you to embed an English report in a web page for display in a browser. You must provide a web page template that includes a marker to show where to embed the data (see Writing a Web Page Template for details) and you generate the report using the GENML or SGENML TCL command (these are ENGLISH commands, similar to LIST and SORT respectively). The data in the report is formatted as a table, the appearance of which can be determined by means of a CSS style sheet included with or linked to the template.

The output from GENML or SGENML is saved to a Reality file item. If this is in a DIR-VIEW file, the associated host directory can be exposed using a web server, making it immediately available for viewing in a web browser.

Normally, all the columns in the data table will have the same appearance. If required, however, you can apply different formatting to one or more columns by using the XT conversion code in the data definition items used when generating the report. To do this you will require a conversion template in which the data can be embedded before insertion into the table - see Writing a Conversion Template for details.

The RealWeb Related Documents topic lists some useful books on writing web pages using HTML and CSS.