An easier way to manage, maintain, and build Veeva iRep presentations

🎉UPDATE: You Probably want velveeva-cli. It's a lot easier to use (especially now that there are native Docker clients on OSX and Windows (!) as well as Linux), and handles all the dependency headaches for you. However, if you're feeling adventurous, or you don't want the container overhead, press on...

• 📷 Automatic screenshot, thumbnail, and zip file generation
• 💉 Support for static asset inlining
• ☕️ Template and partial system (Embedded CoffeeScript)
• 💅 SASS compilation
• 🍻 Automatic project scaffolding
• 🔀 Convert relative links to veeva protocol links on the fly (both during dev and for a final build)
• 🔁 Convert veeva protocol links back to relative links on the fly
• 📝 Tooling to rename slides and automatically change all internal references
• 💩 Automatic iRep control file generator
• 🔎 Smart metadata extraction from HTML (using meta tags, or eco template fields) or XMP data from PDF and JPEG files to easily maintain slide titles and descriptions within source files
• 🚀 Integrated slide uploading to iRep FTP server

VELVEEVA has several dependencies needing to be met before installing

• ImageMagick
• Phantomjs
• Python (3.4+) with pip
• virtualenv (install using pip install virtualenv)

 If installing on OS-X

• Xcode command line tools (xcode-select --install)
• libxml2 (brew install libxml2)
• libexempi (brew install exempi)

🐧 If installing on Linux

• gcc toolchain and headers (ubuntu: sudo apt-get install build-essential)
• libjpeg headers (ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev)
• libxml2 headers (ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev)
• libxslt headers (ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libsxlt-dev)
• libexempi (ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libexempi-dev)
• zlib (ubuntu: sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev)

💣 If installing on Windows

• good luck! A version of velveeva-cli for windows is forthcoming. As of this writing, you might be able to install and run under the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

In your new project's empty root directory, run

git clone https://github.com/drewsynan/VELVEEVA.git && VELVEEVA/install && VELVEEVA/init

This will install the required components for VELVEEVA, and launch a wizard to create a new project. 🍕yum!

• |-src source files for each slide. Create a new subdirectory for each Veeva slide. There must be one file inside the slide that has the same name as its enclosing folder (for example a slide named 01_intro must have a file called 01_intro.html or 01_intro.jpg (for image slides) to be a valid Veeva slide)
• |-globals static assets to be included in all slides. Files and folders here will be copied to the built slide folders. If a folder already exists in the local slide folder, its contents will be merged with the global folder.
• |-templates location of slide templates. Right now VELVEEVA only supports using eco (embedded coffee script) templates. There are plans to change this in the future. Note that templates are not required to compile and package slides
• |-partials html snippet location for templates
• |-build output folder (It's recommended that you add this folder along with tmp to your .gitignore file)
• |-tmp temporary folder (It's recommended that you add this folder along with build to your .gitignore file)

To build a project (including rendering any templates, compiling SASS, taking screenshots, and zipping the results) run

project-root$ VELVEEVA/go

from the project root directory. By default, the built files are created in build/_zips. Under most circumstances, this is sufficient.

👴 For more advanced building options run VELVEEVA/go --help to see a list of configuration options.

If you have configured your iRep FTP server login information, either in the setup phase, or by later editing the VELVEEVA-config.json file in the project's root directory, VELVEEVA can automatically generate any necessary control files and upload them to the server for you. To publish files, first run

project-root$ VELVEEVA/go.py

to make the slides, and then

project-root$ VELVEEVA/go.py --nobake --controls --publishonly

to upload files. To upload with more progress and status information, you can use the command

project-root$ VELVEEVA/go.py --nobake --controls --publishonly --verbose

Since each slide must have a unique name on the Veeva server, it is often necessary to rename slides with a prefix or suffix to ensure uniqueness if two versions of a key message must exist simeltaneously. VELVEEVA provides tooling (prefix.py) to make this process eaiser. The tool works by renaming slide folders, and the internal slide file, and then changing any internal references in any of the slides in the folder specified to reflect the new name. Because the prefixing tool only works on built (but not zipped files) first run the build command (making sure to have resolved any relative links to veeva: links). For example, to prefix a presentation with my_specific_prefix_, it would look something like this

project-root$ VELVEEVA/go.py --clean --screenshots
project-root$ VELVEEVA/lib/prefix.py my_specific_prefix_ build
project-root$ VELVEEVA/go.py --packageonly
(etc)

👴 For further information, run VELVEEVA/lib/prefix.py --help.

For more fine-grained control over the renaming process, VELVEEVA provides a re-linking utility (relink.py). This utility allows you to rename one slide at a time (and change all references from the old name to the new name in a folder specified). For example, to rename the source files of slide 01_something_stupid to index (and change all references within src to point to index and not 01_something_stupid) the command would look something like

project-root$ VELVEEVA/lib/relink.py --mv 01_something_stupid index src

To change references in only the built version of the presentation, first build without packaging (since the utility can't read zip files), and point it at the build directory.

👴 For further information, run VELVEEVA/lib/relink.py --help

Sometimes it's useful to be able to create the surrounding folder around the slide file (in the case of JPEG or PDF slides). VELVEEVA has a utility (folders.py) to quickly do this.

The utility takes a path and an optional wild-card filter, and creates a folder with the same name (minus the extension) around the files it finds. For example, to create slide folders around all pdf files in the folder example:

project-root$ VELVEEVA/lib/folders.py ./example_dir --filter "*.pdf"

(Note the quotes around the wild-card string... this is used to keep bash from interpreting '*' as a special character)

The default screenshot dimensions and names are configured at setup time, but can be altered later by editing the VELVEEVA-config.json file. Additional sizes and names may be specified, and a separate screenshotting tool (screenshot.py) is also provided. To use the screenshotting tool, specify a folder containing the slides to screenshot, and the path to the VELVEEVA-config.json file with screenshot size definition.

project-root$ VELVEEVA/lib/screenshot.py build VELVEEVA-config.json

The FTP control file generator will only work on build (and zipped) slides. It can either be run as with the --controls flag when building, or using the --controlsonly flag on already-built slides. The generator pulls the FTP user name and server information from the VELVEEVA-config.json file, and extracts the title and description fields from the slide files.

• For html slides, the generator reads the contents of <meta name="veeva_title"> and <meta name="veeva_description">
• For pdf slides, the generator reads the title and subject fields of the xmp metadata (editible within Acrobat Pro or Adobe Bridge)
• For jpeg slides, the generator reads the title and description fields of the xmp metadata (editible within Photoshop or Adobe Bridge) If no metadata is found, the title and description fields are omitted altogether from the generated control files.

Control files can also be generated on arbitrary folders of zip files using the ctls.py utility. For example, to generate control files for all zips within the arbitrary_zips folder:

project-root$ VELVEEVA/lib/ctls.py ./arbitrary_zips ./out_folder_for_ctls --u username --pwd password --email contactemail

Although VELVEEVA currently has a lot of useful pieces, it is likely that you'll still want to create a few basic build scripts and a makefile to automate building, renaming, packaging, etc. of the slides. VELVEEVA provides pre-flight and post-flight hooks that can run before and after VELVEEVA for any setup and teardown that might be necessary. (By default, the scaffolder creates pre.sh and post.sh scripts for you. These can be anything besides bash, just update the shebang and change the filenames in VELVEEVA-config.json.)

Here's an example of a post-flight script

#!/bin/bash

# prefix the built slides
./VELVEEVA/lib/prefix.py Digital_Sales_Aid_2016_ build

# rename specific slides that aren't currently handled by VELVEEVA
./VELVEEVA/lib/relink.py --mv video Digital_Sales_Aid_2016_video build
./VELVEEVA/lib/relink.py --mv pdf_gdufa Digital_Sales_Aid_2016_pdf_gdufa build
./VELVEEVA/lib/relink.py --mv pdf_isb Digital_Sales_Aid_2016_pdf_isb build
./VELVEEVA/lib/relink.py --mv pdf_barcode Digital_Sales_Aid_2016_pdf_barcode build
./VELVEEVA/lib/relink.py --mv pdf_value Digital_Sales_Aid_2016_pdf_value build

# package the slides after the renames have been completed
./VELVEEVA/go --packageonly

# move any already zipped files that were just moved from src to the build directory to the final zips folder
cp ./build/*.zip ./build/_zips

# generate controls files based on the _zips directory
./VELVEEVA/go --controlsonly

# copy the _zips directory to a named folder
cp -r ./build/_zips ./build/Digital_Sales_Aid_2016

# combine all zips into one file
zip -r ./build/Digital_Sales_Aid_2016.zip ./build/Digital_Sales_Aid_2016

When used with a makefile, and velveeva-cli, the process can be made as simple as running make in the project directory, and make publish to deploy.

An example makefile below using velveeva-cli

.PHONY : build
build :
	velveeva update
	velveeva go --nuke
	velveeva go --inline
	velveeva go --integrate
	velveeva go --rel2veev
	velveeva go --package

publish :
	velveeva go --controlsonly
	velveeva go --publishonly

The docker container used by velveeva-cli can be created by running make docker_base and make docker