Re: [gnome-db] Re: Report API

["Loren Bandiera" <lorenb mmgsecurity com>]

> Dru wrote:
>
> I havn't looked at xsl-fo before or know whats its capiable of or how it
> works in detail.

XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO) are the second half of the Extensible
Stylesheet Language (XSL).  XSL-FO is an XML application that describes
how pages will look when presented to a reader.

More information:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice6.html#fo-section
http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/bible2/chapters/ch18.html

> Should papyrus be continued to be run as a seperate process or should
> api be changed
> and implimented into gnome-db library?  What does the xsl style sheet do
> for
> the reports?  Does when you dymically build the xsl resolve the database
> queries?

For what I was planning, first you build your GdaReportDocument and then
create the GdaReportResults which is what builds the queries and creates
the XML (If I understand the current API correctly).

The XML would be read and the XSL stylesheet would be dynamically created
and used to transform the report into XSL-FO.

Once you have the formatting objects set you can transform that into
XHTML, PDF, RTF, etc.  You need a FO processor for this step, which is why
I was looking at xmlroff (http://xmlroff.sourceforge.net/).

> 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 don't think it has to be done all in memory but I think it might be good
to have a choice.  Let the programmer choose what approach works best for
them.

-- 
Loren Bandiera, CISSP <lorenb mmgsecurity com>
MMG Security, Inc.