Database to word document

TL;DR Generate Word/PDF documents from SQL Server,
Oracle, and MySQL
using SQL queries.

In every organization, database plays an important role in holding the
entire organization’s data across functions/departments. Organizations
create a variety of documents from this data including sales proposals,
invoices, contracts, compliance documents, and NDAs, etc.

Some industries such as legal, mortgage, and real estate are inherently
document-intensive and documents play a central role in their day-to-day
transactions. The document-generation requirements tend to vary a lot from
on-demand creation of a single document to bulk generation of thousands of documents in one go.

The generated documents are shared with internal and external
stakeholders including customers, vendors, and partners. It could be a simple mail or part of a
complex business process that involves e-sign, approvals, etc.

In essence, database to PDF and Word document generation and their distribution
is an essential job in every organization.

Challenges in Document generation from Database

In traditional databases, data inside the database is stored in tables and
they have a logical connection among them. Hence, Database solutions don’t
have document design capabilities. NoSQL/document databases store data in
JSON or a JSON-like documents and not great for document generation either.

If you are a master of SQL commands, you have a lot of choices including
off-the-shelf PL/SQL packages. But for a non-technical user/business user,
the options are limited. The first option is to knock on the IT department door
for help. However, business documents undergo frequent changes, and getting
IT bandwidth every time for document generation is difficult.

Hence, you find business users tend to look for a solution that allows them
to

1. Create/modify templates easily conforming to the organization’s brand and
   design guidelines.
2. Generate documents with a click of a button.

Let’s look at the tools for addressing these requirements.

Common Tools for Database PDF

The most common solutions being used are not built for database documents generation
and hence offer only a little automation.

Reporting/BI tools:
Tools such as Tableau, Jasper,
Crystal reports generate reports but they lack in document design. These
are best suited for creating interactive reports. Though they make the
document generation easy, business users still need to depend on IT help
for template creation and template changes.

Publishing tools:
Data merge and Mail merge functionality offered by publishing tools such as
Indesign, Microsoft Word is good only for basic document merge. For
example, if you are looking to create a nice report with bullets,
conclusions, other written text, and pre-formatted numbers then a
publishing tool is not the right choice. Moreover, these tools have several
limitations including the inability to suppress blank rows, date &
number formatting errors, etc.

EDocGen for Database to Word and PDF Generation

The system addresses the creation of documents from the databases in a very
elegant fashion. Business users can create/edit templates in their favorite
editors. With a DIY interface, it can populate database data into templates
to generate documents. Users can use existing documents as templates for
document generation. Thus as in previous approaches, they don’t have to go through the
pain of template creation from
scratch or employing developers for template creation.

EDocGen offers the dynamic population of text, tables, hyperlinks, content blocks, and images.
The system also supports the BLOB population into the template. Thus the
extremely flexible to cater to different kinds of business documents including contracts, invoices, etc.

As it
is a cloud application, it enhances collaboration, intelligence, and
mobility of your team to work from anywhere on any device.

Let’s see how it creates documents from different databases.

1. As a first step, select the database from which you want to generate documents.
2. Enter the connection
   details. You can connect to on-premise as well as cloud databases to the system.
3. Enter the query to extract data from the database.

If you cannot enter connection details, alternatively you can extract database data in XML/JSON/Excel
formats and use this data for document automation.

SQL Server: Using FOR XML and FOR JSON, retrieve SQL Server data in XML /JSON format
with a simple SELECT query
and populate results into templates for document generation. Refer to SQL to PDF, SQL to Word for details
on how to go about creating PDF and Word documents from SQL Server.
You can also use API integration for on-demand document generation from SQL Server.

SELECT Title,					
	FirstName,
	MiddleName,					
	LastName,
	Suffix
FROM Person.Person
FOR XML AUTO
GO			      

MySQL: MySQL allows you to retrieve SQL data into a local CSV file through a simple SELECT query.
Populate that into the template for Database documents generation.

You can also export query data into JSON file as well as shown below using
‘JSON_OBJECT’ function.

SELECT CONCAT('[',GROUP_CONCAT(JSON_OBJECT('ID', department_id, 'name', department_name)),']')
FROM departments 

Refer to JSON to Word for details about JSON population into Word template.

Oracle: Using XMLElement and XMLForest, you can export XML data from Oracle
database. Use EDocGen to populate XML data into your template to generate
multiple documents.

Refer to Oracle to PDF, Oracle to Word for details
on how to go about creating PDF and Word documents from the Oracle database.

Document Databases: Document databases such as MongoDB store
data as documents. Thus querying MongoDB data is not straightforward.
You can retrieve the data using db.collection.find() method. Let’s say you have a «students» collection.
Enter «db.students.find()» in the select query input area to retrieve all records of students.

Online Databases: Databases such as Knack, Caspio, etc. offer Zapier
integration. Again here as well integrate with EDocGen to generate
documents. For example, you can set-up a trigger for every new record entry
into the database. This trigger fires and creates a document every time a
record gets added to the database. Even the delivery of documents to
recipients via email can be automated.

In the next step of document generation, map the dynamic fields to query columns. If the names match,
the system auto-maps the fields. Thus you avoid
costly data transformations. Changing of table structure would never affect the document generation.
You can
generate thousands of documents in seconds.

In summary, EDocGen document generation software is the perfect solution
for the database to PDF file and Word document creation. You can use both Word and
PDF templates for database documents creation.

In this article I will explain with an example, how to export data from database to Word document in ASP.Net Core MVC.

The data from the database is fetched using Entity Framework and dynamic HTML string is generated using StringBuilder class.

Finally, the generated HTML string will be exported to Word document in ASP.Net Core MVC.

Database

Here I am making use of Microsoft’s Northwind Database. You can download it from here.

Namespaces

You need to import the following namespace.

Model

The Model class consists of the following four properties.

Database Context

Once the Entity Framework is configured and connected to the database table, the Database Context will look as shown below.

Controller

The Controller consists of following two Action methods.

Action method for handling GET operation

Inside this Action method, the Top 10 records are fetched from the Customers table using Entity Framework and returned to the View.

Action method for handling the Word Document Export and Download operation

This Action method is executed when the Export Button is clicked.

Inside this Action Method, the Top 10 Customer records are fetched from the Customers Table using Entity Framework and then using the StringBuilder class, a string consisting of an HTML Table is generated.

Finally, the HTML string is converted to Byte Array and exported and downloaded as Word document using the File function.

View

Inside the View, in the very first line the Customer Model is declared as IEnumerable which specifies that it will be available as a Collection.

Displaying the Records

For displaying the records, an HTML Table is used.

A loop will be executed over the Model which will generate the HTML Table rows with the Customer records.

Exporting database data to Word Document

Below the HTML Table, there is an HTML Submit button enclosed inside a Form which has been created with following ASP.Net Tag Helpers attributes.

asp-action – Name of the Action. In this case the name is Export.

asp-controller – Name of the Controller. In this case the name is Home.

method – It specifies the Form Method i.e. GET or POST. In this case it will be set to POST.

When the Submit button is clicked, the Form is submitted.

Screenshots

HTML Table

Exported Word document

Downloads

Check out some options how db files might be converted to docx format.

It does not make much sense to convert a database (typically .db file) to a Word document format (.doc, .docx). The only option perhaps would be to convert db to csv or similar text format, and copy paste the text to Word. But that is highly irregular.

Updated: September 16, 2022

Unfortunately, there is no detailed software record in the database for this conversion.

Additional links: Open db file, Open docx file

Back to conversion search