Re: Antw: New gda-report's DTD

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo linuxave net>]

> > still some more ideas to the gda-report's DTD:
> >
> > We should add the attributes bgcolor, fgcolor, ....., negvaluecolor also to the report element and change the #REQUIRED to #IMPLIED in the label, repfield and special element. Then the values in the report element are the defaults for this report, that may be overwritten in the other elements.
> >
> > Now a principle questions: Last week I asked the question, if this DTD describes a report template, that is to be filled with data or a report, that allready contains the data and is intended to be printed. In the meantime I think, it can be both.
> 
> Well i think that the option to include the data into the report it's a
> BAD idea, this is the way methaprast do their reports. We should use a
> gda's database as the data source.
> 
of course! the reports should be dynamic, not as the people in
metaphrast do. Although, we could have an option to store the output in
a file, so that it can be viewed later. But IMO the data should come
from the database on-the-fly.

> > A report designer - or another application that wants to output a report - generates a xml-report-template. This is send to a transformation engine that
> > takes the contained queries, sends them to Vivien's gda-xml-query for processing and inserts the results into the xml-report. The results should be put into label elements, that replace the repfield elements.
> 
> I don't know if this should be correct. Why you want to save the report
> query in a XML file? Why not save it only in RAM ?
> 
> > If the query delivers n rows, then each repfield is replaced by n labels. The x and y coordinates are calculated as follows
> > x(label(k)) = x(repfield), y(label(k)) = y(repfield) + (k-1)*height(detail).
> > The resulting xml-report-data should then be rendered.
> >
> > I've also attach an example template and data-file.
> >
> > What do you think about this?
> >
> 
> As i have tell you, i think that i don't see the utility to save in a
> XML file the report with all data. This would be only used to export the
> report into a HTML page (for example).
> 
another option we could have. I think gnome-print generates Postscript,
so it should be quite easy to convert to other formats.