possible?

[cwiegand startek com (Chris Wiegand)]

I'm looking at making a report engine. Currently, I'm facing the wonderful
prospect of having to design APIs, code, and interfaces for input engines
(aka. DBs, ODBC, etc..), rendering engines (for graphs/charts),
interpreters (for functions and for the XML format I want to use for the
report definition), and output engines (ie. print? save as html? save as
XML?). I found out about GnomeDB and it sounds like I could use it's
engines as my input engines, however, I have a few concerns, and I'd like
to know more:

I've moved programs (albeit VB) from Access to MSSQL, and boy was that fun.
However, I still had to re-write code, including my SQL statements. Does
GnomeDB hide that from the program? Will I have to write a wrapper anyways
for every DB engine GnomeDB supports anyways to take care of the quirks
(like no caching, or weird datatypes), or do I get it just like it's in the
database. I can see the case for either, however, for my program, I want
all to be the same. =)

Also, if I have a stored username/password (think Seagate Info server,
which saves them so that it runs un-attended), can I pass that to each of
the datasources? Do/Can the datasources work with each other (ie. using
multiple data sources at the same time, and do I have to make the data
merge, or can they do that themselves)?

Also, on a totally different and gnome but not gnome-db topic, has anyone
used the Gnome Canvas for printing? Can it also save? I'm just looking to
do something like Crystal Reports (tm, patent, copyright, are property of
their respective holders or whoever owns them), and I'm looking to make my
life easier.

Chris Wiegand
http://openreports.sourceforge.net
(yes, it's a new project, I've been drawing up ideas for awhile, and
decided to get off of my but..)