OpenOffice.org reports

The document flow
OpenOffice.org reports are the most commonly used report formats. OpenOffice.org Writer is used (in combination with [[1]]) to generate a RML template, which in turn is used to generate a pdf printable report.

The internal process

The .SXW template file

• We use a .SXW file for the template, which is the OpenOffice 1.0 format. The template includes expressions in brackets or OpenOffice fields to point where the data from the OpenERP server will be filled in. This document is only used for developers, as a help-tool to easily generate the .RML file. OpenERP does not need this .SXW file to print reports.

The .RML template

• We generate a .RML file from the .SXW file using Open SXW2RML. A .RML file is a XML format that represent a .PDF document. It can be converted to a .PDF after. We use RML for more easy processing: XML syntax seems to be more common than PDF syntax.

The report engine

• The Open Report Engine process the .RML file inserting data from the database at each expression.

in the .RML file will be replaced by the name of the country of the partner of the printed invoice. This report engine produce the same .RML file where all expressions have been replaced by real data.
The final document

• Finally the .RML file is converted to PDF or HTML as needed, using OpenReport’s scripts.

อ้างอิง : Open ERP