Re: Abiword report generator [was Re: Dynamic data queries]

[msevior physics unimelb edu au]

> On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 02:44:10AM +1100, msevior physics unimelb edu au
> was heard to remark:

<snip lots of interesting stuff I'll respond do alter>

> So for example, there could be an abi document that looked
> like "the time now is XXX" and my c program would display
> this document, and it would replace "XXX" by some other string
> of the same length every few seconds, and there would be no
> flickering, and at most an imperceptible redraw.
>

He He :-) We do this already. Open AbiWord, choose "Insert Field", Choose
"insert time" watch it update in your document.

It is easy enough to make a "Insert Data base element" as a field with
some SQL query or higher level abstraction assosciated with it and have it
update in the doc in real time. This is at the expense of doing a
data-base query every N seconds. I guess you'd call this a "pull" from
AbiWord. I think this would be rather easy to implement with libgda. I
should speak to Rodrigo about it.

A push from an exteranl AbiWord is also possible but I'm quite scared of
the security implication of this. I'd also have write an API and learn how
to open up a socket or maybe a corba/bonobo interface.

In both cases I think I'd need help from database-guru's on how to write
an API to best do these things from the C-programmers perspective. ie What
has highest appeal? socket/corba/bonobo/pipe? From my perspective it's
much easier to implement the querey every "N" seconds approach rather than
the potential security issues associated with allowing abi to be
controlled by a remote program.


> I do *not* want to generate a whole lotta xml and save it
> to a file or pipe it anywhere or send or receive it or anything
> like that.  I most certainly do not want to edit the file
> containing the XXX, replace the XXX with some asci string,
> and  pipe that file to abi to redisplay.  I do *not* want to
> do that.
>

No problem. :-) We can be smarter than that.

Cheers

Martin