A school did admissions on paper and it became very hard to print copies of forms and finding a student details, so I implemented a server for them. This server return a HTML form to be filled with students details and then after submit server processes the data and generates a pdf file with the details and send them to the user and also save the copy of the data into an excel file, which can be downloaded to search for students details on later date.
There might be better ways of doing than what i did, feel free to comments a better approach, but i belive any solution other than what i implemented would take mostly the same amount of resources.
The part that i love the most
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The Simple desgin of the form.
Html , Css, Javascript , Bootstrap , Python, pptx(py library), openpyxl(py library), cloud convert api and few Google fonts
For this code to work you'll need a powerpoint(.pptx) file with form design and an excel file which will be used to save every form entry.
The basic logic behind the code is
- Express sends a file
index.html - the form data is recieved and passed on to Python file auto.py to be processed.
- in python the form gets added to excel file and also to pptx file.
- the after python is done with adding data , javascript sends the pptx file to cloud convert to convert pptx to pdf and the after recieving pdf it sends the pdf back to user.
THe problem with this approach is the server can handle only one Request at a time. because the data needs to be written in a pptx file with gets converted to pdf. as there is only one static pptx , the second request must wait for the first to complete. pptx file can be created dynamically and the data can be written, allowing the server to process more than one request at a time but the school wanted that only one student application be processed at once for some reasons , so let this approach be sued.