I’ve been writing document assembly software for the past few weeks and I’ve found some interesting challenges in the process. One is an issue where some placeholders in the document template break after I edit the template file manually.
Before I show you the details and the solution I found, let me give you some context by reviewing what document assembly is.
Document Assembly Systems
An automated document assembly system, or document automation system, merges data originated from a repository, or collected on the fly through a user interface, into a document template, to generate electronic documents as its output.
There can be various levels of complexity in this process, ranging from simple data insertion into the document template, to applying complex logic and conditional transformations to the source data during the merge process. Think about hiding or showing paragraphs, inserting or removing list items, and highlighting or underlining text blocks.