CCCVTK: The Canadian Common CV Toolkit

(User Manual, version 2013-06-06)

The Canadian Common CV (CCV) is a website that allows Canadian researchers to manage data about their publications, research grants, etc. in a uniform and centralized way. Most major funding agencies, such as NSERC or FRQNT, now expect applicants to submit a CV auto-generated from the data input in the CCV.

The "generic" version of the CCV is a large data structure whose contents are independent of any requirements for funding agencies. Each instance of the CCV for a particular agency is actually generated by fetching the parts of the generic CV required by that agency. A nice feature of the generic CV is that it can be exported as an XML file.

CCCVTK, the Canadian Common CV Toolkit, offers a set of tools that allows a researcher to parse that file, and then query it in various ways. Of particular interest is the ability to generate a LaTeX document based on the information contained in this file, using only the fields chosen by the user and presented in a completely configurable way (if you know LaTeX). Hence, the data contained in the generic CV can be used to produce a customized CV of any style and shape.

System requirements {#requirements}

PHP, a free programming language and interpreter. Any recent version (e.g. 5.3 and higher) should work.
LaTeX, a document typesetting system. LaTeX is open source and versions exist for most operating systems; popular distributions include MiKTeX for Windows systems and TeXLive for Linux.

Installing CCCVTK {#installing}

The latest version of CCCVTK is available on GitHub at the following URL:

https://github.com/sylvainhalle/CCCVTK

To install CCCVTK, unzip the contents of the archive on GitHub into some folder. Alternatively, you can clone the Git repository using the instructions that appear at the top of the GitHub page.

Exporting the CCV as an XML file {#exporting}

The first step in using CCCVTK is to obtain all the data you already input into the CCV as an XML file (we assume this (time consuming) step is already completed). This can easily be done through the CCV's website.

First, login to the CCV as usual. Once logged in, locate and click on the "Generic" item under the "CV" menu entry at the top of the screen.

Then, locate and click on the "Export" item under the "Transfer" menu entry at the top of the screen.

You will be asked to Export the CV. Click on the "Export" button.

You will be asked to Save the resulting file to some folder. Save the resulting file as cv.xml into the same folder where you installed CCCVTK.

Generating a CV from the XML file {#generating}

Once you obtained the CCV data in XML form, you can use CCCVTK to generate a customized LaTeX CV from the data contained in this file. Doing so is simple. Open a terminal of command line window, and move to the folder where you saved CCCVTK and the XML file from the previous step. On the command line, type:

php xml-to-latex.php > cv.tex

This command does two things. The first part (before the >) calls the PHP interpreter and instructs it to execute the file xml-to-latex.php. This file contains a program that reads the file cv.xml, parses its contents, and outputs a LaTeX document that selects and formats various entries from the file as a generic CV. The second part (after the >) tells the program to send its output into a new file, called cv.tex (you can replace this with any filename you wish, although it is recommended you keep the .tex extension).

If you list the contents of the folder, you should now see that it contains a new file, namely cv.tex. This file is a stand-alone document that can be compiled with LaTeX. To do so, simply call on the command line:

pdflatex cv.tex

You should see a lot of information sent to the screen. Once the program stops, hopefully it should have produced a PDF file from the contents of cv.tex, called cv.pdf. You may then open cv.pdf and be able to read a clean, but rather plain version of a curriculum vitae based on information fetched from cv.tex (itself built from cv.xml we just downloaded from the CCV website).

So, why bother doing all this? We list a few advantages:

The program xml-to-latex.php is a program that generates a CV from the website's contents. This means that every time you update information on the the website, you can re-download the XML file and re-generate the CV from the updated contents automatically.
Since the CV is generated from a program, a lot of things can be computed dynamically from the XML file's contents. For example, the bundled version of xml-to-latex.php generates a table that summarizes the contents of the CV's various sections (number of courses taught, total of research funds, number of students supervised, etc.). This information is automatically created from the XML file and is recomputed on-the-fly if you update the XML.
The program can be modified to your liking (if you know a bit of PHP programming). You can completely change the way publication info is displayed, use any LaTeX packages and commands you wish to change the CV's basic appearance, add new computations on the CV's content, filter data according to various criteria (e.g. all publications up to year XXXX) or remove complete section altogether. As a matter of fact, you can completely bypass xml-to-latex.php and write your own CV generator, fetching desired values from the CV using the CCV classes that come with CCCVTK.

Using the CCCVTK API {#api}

The file xml-to-latex.php is actually a PHP script that merely fetches and formats data from a class called CommonCV. This class is defined in the companion file common-cv.lib.php, which can be included in any PHP program independently of xml-to-latex.php. This section is intended for PHP programmers and only provides brief information on how to use this class. Please refer to the source code for more details.

To instantiate a common CV:

$cv = new CommonCV("filename.xml");

This will read and parse filename.xml and return a new instance of the CCV based on its contents.

From then on, various parts of the CV can be fetched through methods. Each method returns data from the CCV as an associative array. For example, to obtain the list of conference papers, call:

$my_array = $cv->getConferencePapers();

Variable $my_array now contains an associative array where a key is a paper ID, and its associated value is another array containing the various fields pertaining to that paper. Hence, to iterate through all papers and display their title, one might write:

foreach ($my_array as $id => $contents)
{
  $title = $contents["title"];
  echo "$title\n";
}

Other sections of the CCV can be retrieved using other methods in a similar way. Please refer to xml-to-latex.php or to common-cv.lib.php for examples and more information.

About the Author {#about}

CCCVTK was developed by Sylvain Hallé, currently an Assistant Professor at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada and head of LIF, the Laboratory of Formal Computer Science ("Laboratoire d'informatique formelle"). Use CCCVTK at your own risk!

akhanf/CCCVTK