Reporting

[Greg Breland <gbreland weldae org>]

Suprised to see a post on your Blog about reporting in Glom but not the
mailing list.  I assume this is the correct place to talk about this
topic?

First, I agree that Glom needs a way to create/run reports.  It would be
ideal if this solution had a GUI that non developers could use to
create/modify reports.  It would also be nice for it to have at least
some knowledge of the database structure to make building the report
query easier.

However, I think reporting is out of scope for Glom outside of
integrating with a 3rd party product. Its also true there are no good
options for 3rd party reporting. That said, this is just my opinion and
the person submitting code decides whats in scope.  

I guess I've used a lot of packages over the years that decided, for
various reasons, that they needed an integrated report writer. They do
it because there was no good 3rd party tool available(Mr Project) or
they wanted very tight integration(MS Access).  I have yet to see an
implementation that worked out well.  Some examples are:

Mr Project
Goldmine
SalesLogix
MS Access

I would advocate creation of a separate project to make sure things
don't start overly mingling.  I would be willing to help out with a
reporting project that is fully application independent.  I'm in the
same boat as Glom in that I know I'll need a reporting system at some
point and there are no viable candidates.  The real question is how much
integration do you require for Glom?

My project doesn't need much integration at all.  The only requirement I
would have is that the output be 100% cross platform.  I wouldn't
include Cairo in that definition.  Output would have to be something
like HMTL, PDF, PS or maybe even SVG.  I'm flexible with the GUI
designer interface.

A reporting system is a huge project.  Its probably bigger than both my
project and Glom put together.  I would expect we would focus on getting
a very basic framework working and since its a separate project let
others improve it as needed and we all reap the benefits.