Not really sure if this is the correct place to posting this, but thought someone here might have a little experience with this.
We have a MySQL Database containing a number of products (well, 3,200 actually). For obvious reasons we don’t want to have to retype everything into InDesign to produce our catalogue for the new season. Does anyone have experience with building something similar to the Microsoft ‘Mail Merge’ functionality in InDesign?
There’s also another caveat. The items in the DB have a unique serial number, which is 5 digits in length. We then have three coloured bars which are colour-coded according to the last two digits of the item’s serial number. For example, the number 12345 would have the three vertical bars coloured as red, green, red (in our system, 5 represents the colour red, and 4 represents the colour green).
Does anyone know if this kind of functionality is available in InDesign? I was thinking that it might be possible to generate a PHP file that outputs everything in a PDF format, but since we might need to edit a few details, we would ideally like this information to be readily available and editable in Adobe InDesign.
If anyone has experience with this, I would certainly welcome your comments.
First you must prepare the data in XML format, export to XML
and then, import XML into the indesign document(View -> Structure; Import XML …), which previously prepare in InDesign
InDesign works with the XML data, saving much time