We have InDesign files created and now we would like to populate the database with content available in InDesign file.
Is there an SDK to read InDesign files content and populate it to database?
Or Please suggest the best approach to get database populated from InDesign?
I know there is an XML export from InDesign files and then that can be imported to DB... but this process has lot of manual work to tie-up relationships between the content in InDesign file.
Using the 'Tags' feature tag the indesign frames that you want to export into the database.
Then via apple or javascript export the contents of the tagged frames.
Clearly there aren't any magic that I know of. You can generate a xml structure based on the applied styles within the document but that will probably not fit your database requirements. I second many people here. Scripting is the way to go. I did that a few years ago with a catalogue that was previously done all by hand. We could finally extract all teh contents and inject it within the database thanks to a script.
You can program the InDesign scripting API using VBScript or VB6 or VBA or VB.NET and ADO (ActiveX Data Objects) to write to a database.
Scripting would be the way to go. You can download documentation/SDKs/tutorials straight from Adobe to get started:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/indesign/documentation.html
Hope this helps!
Contents in the InDesign file can be broadly divided into: - text(from the text frames) - images(from the graphic frame) - meta info from the file(no. of pages, frames and other layout information)
To keep the database updated with the InDesign file content, I will suggest to use the InDesign scripting and provide some unique custom identifier to each of the frames(you can use the insertLabel()/extractLabel() scripting API's to do that. Once you are done with this, you can latch on to the after safe event(check CEP docs for the exact event name) and prepare a complete JSON(with custom frame IDs and there content) of the InDesign document. After that, you can send this JSON to the DB and map the relevant fields using an ORM(e.g. doctrine) or a custom plugin to the DB tables depending on what DB you are using.
Hope this helps!
You can export to XML but importing to a database would depend on the structure of the data. Databases are pretty stupid. They want all the data in order by field name. If you have regularized data, such as first,last,phone/first,last,phone/ the db won't have a problem. If the data doesn't follow a pattern, you'll have to use scripting.
