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[Enterprise Edition and above]
dycodoc is the visual designer shipped with the Enterprise and Interactive Editions of VPE. Please refer to the "dycodoc Guided Tour" for details on using dycodoc.
With dycodoc you can edit the layout of a document by point and click with the mouse. dycodoc helps to save a lot of work for coding the layout, but even more important: it gives your end users the capability to modify layouts.
The layouts you create with dycodoc can be stored to file. These document files have the suffix DCD, which stands for Dynamic Content Document. Each time you save a DCD to file, dycodoc writes also a template file with the same name - but the suffix TPL - to disk. Template files contain the compiled layout of a DCD, which can be loaded and processed with VPE at the runtime of your application.
When you load a template file, VPE will create a Template Object from it in memory. Using the VPE API, you can query the layout- and data source structure from a template. In addition you are able to perform several operations and modifications on a Template Object by code, including the assignment of values to fields (i.e. variables).
After you have done all necessary modifications on a template and assigned values to the fields used in the template, you finally dump the template into a VPE Document, i.e. the template with the resolved field values is inserted into a document.
Of course you may use the VPE API (see “Programming Techniques”) to insert at any time - before and after dumping a template - any number of additional objects by code into a VPE Document.
Moreover it is also possible to retrieve and modify the objects that have already been inserted into a VPE Document.