I’m putting together a simple website for our department. I’d like to include one of the references that we use often on the main page. A word document that contains a priority list for outstanding work. This document is generated by another department and located on a shared drive.
My ultimate goal is to have a table on the main page that contains the various items in the priority list. I would like a mechanism that automatically checks the word docs about once an hour, parses the document, generates a table from the info in the doc, and updates the main page accordingly.
I’ve never done anything like this and have no idea where to start or if what I’m asking is even possible. I’m not in IT and do not have the ability to use ASP or PHP at the moment. So I’d like to avoid server-side scripting if possible, but I may be able to work something out if absolutely necessary.
You won’t be able to do something like that without scripting / programming. It’s really just a question of what programming language you want to use. It may be better to hire someone to do this for you, as it sounds a bit out of the scope of a forum to me. All the same, we can move this to another forum if you want to pursue it here.
Reinforcing what Ralph said… PHP/ASP IS the automation mechanism… without access to that and knowledge on how to operate said mechanism this is just wishing for the problem to be solved out of mere desire, just not even a realistic request.
However I do understand with going on the cheap… so here are some possible “ghetto” work arounds. They do not meat ALL requirements, as I said before those were unrealistic, but maybe it will provide a “band aid” solution to your issue.
1). Assuming your ISP gives you access to PHP and your people have discipline, if not coding skill you can do the following:
a) Rename the affected pages ( those you want to contain tables, and update any link those pages accordingly ) with the suffix “.php”
Eg.: “table.htm” to “table.php” AND “<a href=‘table.html’>table page</a>” to “<a href=‘table.html’>table page</a>”
b) When saving Word Docs… SAVE A COPY AS HTML, this produces the most HORRENDOUS HTML code known to man, but at least its HTML …
c) Upload that file to your server
d) In your page ( ex… table.php) use : <? include(“theNameOfMyTableFile.html”) ?>; to automatically bring THat particular file into that tat particular page.
This is as close as you can get w/o programming a script.
If the document is saved in the DOCX format, it won’t be too hard. A DOCX-file is actually a zipped folder, which contains, amongst other things, the contents of the document in XML format. Simply unzip the document as if it was any other ZIP-file, and look for document.xml in the word folder. You can now use XSLT to convert the XML to HTML. This is not too complicated if you know a bit of XML/XSLT, and is certainly easier than building a parser in PHP/ASP.
