[Gambas-user] report

[Rob]

On Tuesday 08 July 2003 00:06, Kannan S wrote:
> b. Open Office integration, if available/could   be incorporated as we
> speak, will open a new world of functionality, jus like MS-Office
> applications. One can export/write reports using the spreadsheet,
> mail-merge with the Writer, graphics and presentations and the list will
> jus get growing.

The OpenOffice Writer format (*.sxw) is pretty easy to understand if you make 
a report mockup looking how you want it and then unzip the .sxw file.  It's 
just a particular flavor of XML.  I've been looking into it for generating 
printed reports off of the web lately.

Also, you know, Gambas does have a Printer object that looks like it works 
more or less the same way as VB's.  I've written any number of reporting 
engines using the VB printer object and keeping track of cursor position etc. 
in class variables.  For your early experimentation at least this should be 
easier than options A or B.

Finally, though I'd no longer recommend it, it's really not that difficult to 
pick up enough Postscript to roll your own print output and pipe it to 
Ghostscript to get your choice of output format (e.g. PDF.)  I've done this 
for two web apps as well, neither of which I own or have access to anymore.  
It would be the hardest of these options but if someone came up with a 
consistent way of doing this it could result in a toolkit-independent printer 
library for Gambas.

Once someone comes up with some best practices (heh, buzzword) for generating 
reports in Gambas maybe we can develop a standard reporting library, if not 
an actual report generator helper app like the database manager.

I'm not volunteering yet, but if it's not out there by the time I need to do 
one of these things, I'll be writing it anyway ;)

Rob