Re: Antw: New gda-report's DTD

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo linuxave net>]

Gerhard Dieringer wrote:
> 
> >>> Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo@linuxave.net> 03.08.2000  17.30 Uhr >>>
> > ...
> > well, all this GNOME part we're talking about is only for the output and
> > visual design of the report, or this is what I think myself. The idea
> > I've got about the report engine is:
> >
> > * gda-report: the core of the engine. It reads the report, checks it,
> > and run it, calling a higher-level supplied callback for all the
> > presentation. This module is in libgda-client, so it does not depend at
> > all on GNOME, and won't be using neither libglade nor gnome-print. In
> > fact, it won't mind at all about how the report is showed to the user
> > * gnome-db-report: the higher-level module which makes all the output
> > stuff for the report. This should be splitted in the presentation part
> > (gnome-print) and the designer.
> >
> > Of course, I also think that the gda-report part should be very useful
> > even when used without the gnome-db part. So we could add converters to
> > different formats as suggested by Derek among other useful things. Also,
> > the gda-report must let modify the report file programatically for the
> > report designer for example.
> > ...
> 
> Let's see, if I understood you right.
> 
> We have an app - maybe gnome-app -- like a report-designer -- or maybe none-gnome-app - that creates a report-template.
> This template lives in the RAM in form of a (DOM-)tree and can be written to a file as XML for later processing.
> Next we have gda-report: It takes the tree and populates it with data. This step is GNOME-independant.
> In a last step we can
> - write this new tree to a file as XML for later printing/viewing (GNOME-independant).
> - write this new tree to a file as XML and run this through a customzied Jade, as Derek suggested (GNOME-independant).
> - render this tree with gnome-db-report using gnome-print (GNOME-dependant).
> 
> Is this right? Or does gda-report more than just populating the tree with data?
> 
well, we should add all GNOME-independant parts to gda-report.

> What I don't understand:
> When a user starts with a report-template, where is she asked for here preferences: select some parameters for the queries,
> select font family, font size, paper size, .... ?
> 
for the GNOME part this is easy, just using a print setup dialog. For
non-GNOME, I'm not sure how to do it. We could, for example add
functions to gda_report about this, so that it can be changed on-the-fly
by the report front-end (GNOME part). And so, if you write a tool which
generates a report from the command line, you just have to call these
functions, which is the same as the GNOME part will do.