Main_Page

• Is IBD for me?
• Technology
• Getting Started
• Documentation
• Credits

Is IBD for me?

The IDB application is a sophisticated, web-based Word document generator. It uses two pieces of information as input:

• A master template Word document, which you provide. This template is a regular Word document; you edit the template with Word and there are convention you follow to specify the dynamic aspects of the document, for instance: where dynamic data should be inserted, or one what condition that part of text should be kept.
• Information provided by users through a web form to generate a document based on the template.

Out of the box, IBD ships everything needed to generate a document called Standard Request for Proposal. This includes a large form of more than 200 fields organized in sections and subsections and its corresponding template document of 180 pages. Both the form and the template document are fully internationalized and available in English and Spanish.

Technology

• IBD is a server-side product. IBD is built on top of Java and thus can run on practically any server (UNIX, Windows). You will find more on the subject in the [Installing_Tomcat_and_IBD_Builds] section of the documentation.
• Once deployed users access IBD through a standard Web browser (e.g. IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera). Ajax is used to provide a rich user interface, for instance allowing for fields to be validated on the fly.
• IBD forms are created in XForms, a W3C standard.
• IBD runs on the Orbeon Forms XForms implementation, which ships with IBD. Orbeon Forms is licensed under a business-friendly open source license (LGPL).

Getting Started

1. Download IBD.
2. See below for the sections of the documentation related to installation.
3. Join the community: check out the ibd-general forum, and click on Monitor this forum to receive a notification when a new message is posted in the forum. To monitor the form or post in the forum you need to be logged into SourceForge, which you can do by following the links Log In or Create Account at the top of every page.

Documentation

• [Change_Log]
• Administrator Documentation
  • [Installing_Tomcat_and_IBD_Builds]
  • [Setup_for_SQL_Server]
• Form and Document Author Documentation
  • [Word_Template_Basics]
  • [Removing_Entire_Sections]
  • [Creating_Help]
  • [Internationalization]
  • [Drop-downs]
• Developer Documentation
  • [Building_IBD]
  • [Word_Document_Generation_and_Attachment]

Credits

The development of IBD is financed by the Inter-American Development Bank and has been developed by Orbeon with IADB.