DavideWasTaken/docentric-skill

Teach Claude to design Docentric reports for Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations.
A Claude skill that reads, validates,
previews, edits and creates Docentric AX templates — and converts SSRS reports to Docentric — from a plain request.
A template built from a short layout spec , previewed in English and Italian with its sample data.
> "In the purchase order template, add the vendor's item number after the item code, show the notes only when
> they're filled in, and let me see it."
With this skill Claude finds the elements in the template, checks the fields exist in the report data, makes the
change, validates every binding and looks at a rendered preview before handing the file back. When a field is
not in the data yet, it says so — and explains the X++ / DDSP change instead of inventing a binding.
## Why a skill, and not just "here's my .docx"
Claude can unzip a .docx and edit XML on its own. A Docentric template is a Word document plus a hidden registry:
content controls tagged - , an element tree, XSD schemas and sample data from the DDSP,
template labels mixed with cached D365 labels. Hand edits easily produce files that open in Word and break in the
Docentric Designer or at print time — a table row whose cells no longer match the grid, an element missing from the
registry, a binding to a field that does not exist.
The skill gives Claude the format knowledge and a tested tool (one JavaScript file, 121 tests behind it).
We measured it. Four requests — add a column, add a field that does not exist, create a delivery note, and add a
column to a real 14-column customer purchase order (not published) — each run by fresh Claude agents with and without
the skill, outputs checked with the validator and a structural check:
| Request | With the skill | Without |
| Add a column to the example invoice | 41 s · 75 k tokens | 138 s · 101 k tokens |
| Add a field that is not in the data | 47 s · 75 k | 33 s · 70 k |
| Create a delivery note from the invoice data | 68 s · 84 k | 181 s · 114 k |
| Add a column to a real 14-column purchase order | 78 s · 92 k · 12 tool calls | 290 s · 123 k · 30 tool calls |
| Correct, valid templates | 4 / 4 | 4 / 4 |
The honest reading: a frontier model can do these edits on its own — it reverse-engineers the format and writes a
throwaway script for every request. With the skill it is two to four times faster and cheaper, and the work is
repeatable: the same tested code every time instead of a new script, validation with did-you-mean suggestions, a
real multi-page preview, and the parts nobody improvises — SSRS conversion and the D365 field/DDSP workflow. Running
these tests also improved the skill: the first run on the real template showed that addcolumn squeezed every
column and that previews stopped at page 1; both were fixed, and the agent no longer falls back to editing XML by
hand. The test cases live in skills/docentric/evals.
## What Claude can do with it
| 🔍 Inspect | Report, DSP class, languages, data sources, every element with its binding and data context, the schema's field tree. |
| ✅ Validate | 19 offline rules: bindings vs the schema with did-you-mean, orphaned controls, missing/untranslated labels, variables, provisional schemas. |