Re: Report generator

[Daniel Kasak <dkasak nusconsulting com au>]

Rodrigo Moya wrote:

>On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 09:14 +1000, Daniel Kasak wrote:
>  
>
>>Francisco Santiago Capel Torres wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>I am porting my report generator done in Qt to GTK. 
>>>Before going on, could you tell me what other report generators are already 
>>>done or being done for GTK under the GPL?
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>None.
>>    
>>
>
>there is Papyrus: http://papyrus.treshna.com/
>  
>
Yeah I know papyrus.

I actually donated some money to get a couple of issues fixed ( which
the author did promptly ).
It's quite temperamental. I especially didn't like some of the
formatting issues it had. Apparently this was due to it using latex. I
found it incredibly difficult and frustrating to get a simple report
working, and it offers practically no debugging information if something
goes wrong. Plus it's written in C ( I'm using Perl ), so it really was
a challenge to get working - even to get it compiled.

I *did* like the XML report definition, which I hope to clone in
PDF::ReportWriter down the track.
I *didn't* like the idea of papyrus performing the query itself - I'd
rather be able to pass the data in. And yes I know I can dump the data
in a temporary table and the point papyrus at it ... this is what I
ended up doing.

Also, I'm pretty sure that papyrus didn't support colour. Oh yeah plus
there was no GUI for it last time I checked, but the author was working
on one.

Anyway, the frustrations that latex caused me and the author led me to
believe that a better way to go about things was to write something ( in
Perl of course ) which renders to Postscript or PDF directly, and now
that I've got a proof-of-concept in under 400 lines of code that handles
formatting very gracefully, I stand by that view 100% :)

I just checked out the homepage of papyrus again. The 'GUI' that it has
is only a GUI to select which report to run ... not to define the
report. The report definition still has to be edited in XML. Or am I
wrong? Not that the XML layout was bad. Like I said, this was one of the
best things about papyrus - it's just that the damned formatting didn't
follow what I put in the XML - unless I read from the bible backwards
while waving a dead chicken in the air...

-- 
Daniel Kasak
IT Developer
NUS Consulting Group
Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway
North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060
T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2 9922 7989
email: dkasak nusconsulting com au
website: http://www.nusconsulting.com.au