Re: [gnome-db] Re: Report API

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Fri, 2004-04-16 at 00:19 +1200, Dru wrote:
> >it would pretty nice if this API had some progress reporting. That is,
> >GdaReportDocument could have signals that warn about progress, so that
> >apps can display status messages, for instance, while the conversion
> >process is being run.
> >  
> >
> Could have a file /tmp directory marking progress. Signals have cross 
> plateform issues
> and if runs in a different process it makes things difficult. 
> 
well, we are talking about GObject signals, so that the client app can
get those signals, without having to poll a given file by hand.

And what out-of-process uses are you thinking about?

> I havn't looked at xsl-fo before or know whats its capiable of or how it 
> works in detail.
> Should papyrus be continued to be run as a seperate process or should 
> api be changed
> and implimented into gnome-db library?
>
I think this is the best idea. We want apps to use the reporting engine
for their own needs, so having a simple API for it is the way to go.
Then papyrus can be a GUI frontend (a specialized app) for generating
those reports using that API.

>   What does the xsl style sheet do for
> the reports?  Does when you dymically build the xsl resolve the database 
> queries?
> 
It is used to convert from the XML to a different format. But this, IMO,
should be a 2nd step in the API, that is, you run the report, getting
the XML output, and then, if the app wants, you convert it to other
format.

> Do you need to construct reports in memory? (at moment input is only a 
> file but parser could
> be modified to take xml doc instead in memory instead). 
> 
I guess we can just pass GdaReportDocument/Output objects over. And then
utility functions such as gda_report_document_from_file,
gda_report_document_output_to_file/memory/etc

cheers