Using templates for reports

While plain text can convey a lot of information, to generate better reports, we need a system where styling can be added to the text. Details such as bold text, bullet points, and images can make a difference. As all browsers work with HTML, generating reports in this format is a good option. Everyone is familiar with a browser rendering text.

HTML is a very flexible format that can be used to render rich text and reports. While an HTML template can be managed as pure plain text, doing so is very error prone and tedious. There are tools that allow you to add better handling of structured text and define templates.

This also detaches the template from the code, separating the generation of the data from the representation of that data. The styling of the template can be done separately by specialized designers, making it look great.

Getting ready

The tool used in this recipe, Jinja2, reads a file that contains the template...