Some ideas about report

["Gerhard Dieringer" <DieringG eba-haus de>]

Hi Carlos,

while doing the XML-output-part of my report-design-tool, I had the following ideas:

We have a three level structure for the report:

Report
  |
  +-- Section  (reportheader, pageheader, ....)
         |
         +-- Element  (label, field, ...)

but we have default values for the styles (bgcolor, fgcolor, ...) only for the whole report.
It would be usefull, to also have default values for each section.

The strategy when rendering the report should be:
if element has attribute then use it
else if section has attribute then use it
else if report has attribute then use it
else use hard wired default (or error ???)

This of course requires to change the DTD a lot.

I also would like to add two new attributes to all items (sections and elements):

active (yes|no)  "yes"
All elements with active="no" should be ignored when processing/rendering the report

visible (yes|no) "yes"
This attribute is for internal use of the designer and should be ignored by other applications.


---------------------
Gerhard