Merlin also searches the folder “~/Library/Application Support/Merlin/Reports” for plug-ins. Instead of changing the standard report, let’s create a copy of the standard report and edit that to suit our taste. Also, if we change this file, we will no longer be able to generate the standard reports, which may inconvenience other users on your machine.
MERLIN PROJECT TUTORIAL UPDATE
The remainder of this article takes you through that process.īefore you barge in and change the Report.xslt that we have just found, please consider that that file is replaced every time you update the Merlin application. The object of all this digging was to learn how we could create our own reports, so let’s start doing that now. The file named Report.xslt is the file that drives the report generation process. Do the same to reveal the contents of NextDueActivities.mrept. Right-click on the Merlin application in /Applications and use “show package contents” to reveal the contents of that application. If terminals are not your thing, you can follow the path using a finder window. Please open one of your projects in Merlin and generate a “Next due Activities” report. Let’s dissect that report and its sources. Merlin’s reporting engine can take an XSLT style sheet and transform the project XML file into some other format.Ĭonsider for example the “Next due Activities” report. As you might expect, this is precisely what Merlin does. The advantage of using XML is that it can be transformed into practically any other file format using XSLT. Internally, Merlin uses XML to store your projects and project data. The report will generate a list of activities for each team member, rather than for just one team member or for the entire team. Next, we’ll set up our own report, based on of of Merlin’s standard reports. We will play around with Merlin’s standard features a bit to find out what is stored where. A word of caution: it is entirely possible for you to create a plug-in that will crash Merlin when you load it or when you use it to generate a report.įirst, we will look at how Merlin generates reports and where all the necessary files are stored.
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