OFFICE TAGGER : A PowerPoint Generating Web Application

Sammanfattning: Presentations are widely used, e.g. at education and business, every dayandaround the world. Many organizations need to constantly updatepresentationsgenerated fromdatabase data, but this type of functionality is not readily availableat low cost.These days programming of almost any technology can useXML files to store or transport data over the Internet. Another reason for preferring XML is that it is platform independent. Therefore, many companies are using the XML format for electronic data interchange. The project presented in this thesis has investigatedhow to build a web service which can usea defined XML file(using the PresentationML specification), generated from e.g. a business database and returna fully functional .pptx PowerPoint presentation to the client.Firstly, related work and scientific articles were examined mostly from the IEEEXplore database. This was helpful in establish a frame of reference to buildthis thesis projectaround.Thereafter, the development phase ofthe project started. Here, technologieswhich have been developed by Microsoft such as ASP .NET and Microsoft SQL Server were usedfor creating the project code. Next, a Microsoft SQL Serverdatabase was created which stored all PML (presentationML) elements, to compare with parsed XML tags in user-uploaded XML tags. This routine would use XmlTextReader. After validation of uploaded XML filetags, the web service starts the process of creating a Microsoft PowerPoint .pptx file asrequested. The web service, having received related XML tags as parameters returnsa Microsoft PowerPoint .pptx file.The generated Microsoft PowerPoint .pptx file is sent to the user via e-mail through a designated SMTP mail robot. According to project specifications,the file can then bedownloaded.Although working, the Office Tagger project will need furtherdevelopment in the future. As Microsofthas started to support XML-based open document format, this hascreatedopportunities for converting moreMicrosoft Office documents types, not only.pptx