Simon User Guide

Report Templates

The Report Templates folder contains HTML (and other format) files to allow customizing the appearance and content of Simon reports. This folder is located within the Simon data folder, at "~/Library/Application Support/Dejal/Simon/". You can get to it quickly via the Reveal in Finder button in the Report Options section of the New / Edit Report window.

You don't need to edit the templates (or even look at them) to use Simon. Simon comes with a number of useful templates, which will be automatically installed in the Report Templates folder when Simon 2.1 or later is first launched. The Simon website also hosts updated and user-contributed templates: check out the Simon Extras page. However, if you wish, you can tweak the provided templates to suit your requirements, or even create new ones. If you create or modify a template and think others may find it useful, please contribute it: check out the Simon Extras web page for instructions.

The Report Templates folder contains sub-folders for each template. Within each of those folders are some or all of the following items:

Most templates use HTML formatting, but this isn't a requirement. Any text-based format can be used. For example, the built-in templates demonstrate using XML for a RSS feed, and tab-delimited text.

In addition, the template files employ special Simon-specific tags, which are replaced with the tests, checks, changes, failures, and notifications of Simon, plus other values. These tags use much the same conventions as regular HTML, but with distinctive delimiters. There are two main kinds of tags - block and variable:

Block tags:

Variable tags:

Block and variable tags and their parameters are not case sensitive, so feel free to use MixedCase to make them more readable if you wish.

The Summary page has two block scopes - the document itself, and the test block. Click for more information on variables for each kind of block:

The Detail pages support several kinds of blocks:

See the parameters page for information on the available parameters.

See the above pages for more information, and the provided templates for examples.

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