[Suggestion]Pull From Stack During Design Phase

Whether you're using the Standard or Professional Edition of Quartam Reports, this is the place to ask general questions about using this industry-level reporting tool for LiveCode.
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NingImport
Posts: 87
Joined: Sun Jul 18, 2010 5:23 pm

[Suggestion]Pull From Stack During Design Phase

Post by NingImport » Sun Jul 18, 2010 6:52 pm

[Suggestion]Pull From Stack During Design Phase

Posted by Mike Kerner on July 14, 2008 at 11:37pm

I don't know about y'all, but the report designers I'm accustomed to dealing with are tightly integrated with the development tools, so when building a report from a project, the report writer is well-aware of the project file.

It would be nice if QR would pull from the stack during the report design phase - such things as fieldnames, size, font styles, positions, etc. to make the design a lot simpler. Right now with QR I have to build the reports from scratch, without having access to what I've already done in the stack.

Especially in the case of groups (or linked database queries), I'd like to be able to drop in fields (or columns in the case of queries), without having to essentially start over, creating a label for the data, then the field, then resizing everything and then linking them to the associated field (or column).

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Reply by Jan Schenkel on July 15, 2008 at 9:02pm

Quartam Reports is designed from a perspective of complete separation between the data access and presentation layer. It was modeled after the Report Builder that shipped with FoxPro, and I made some compromises as I wanted the system to be flexible, and not limited to printing just database cursors or just stacks.

Naturally, I do want to move into a system that is more tightly integrated with your projects. For now, the layout builder needs to stay separate from the Rev IDE, as there are ninety-nine ways to break it when running as a plug-in inside the Rev IDE in its current incarnation.

Of course I'm open to suggestions, though I would like to stress that I won't tie it into a specific methodology and will always favour the open approach. Yes, it would be great if you could embed layouts into stacks, and drag-and-drop fields from a predefined database query. One step at a time, though...

Jan Schenkel
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Quartam Reports & PDF Library for Revolution
www.quartam.com

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Reply by Mike Kerner on July 15, 2008 at 9:15pm

How about when doing a new layout just sucking in the fields from the stack that's being reported on? That would make life easier - create both labels and fields based on the "imported" fields from the stack.

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Reply by Jan Schenkel on July 15, 2008 at 10:59pm

The tricky part is that there isn't necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between the layout of the entry screen and the layout of the print form. Especially not in these days when monitors go widescreen and developers may have dramatically different designs per platform or per physical screen size.
Moreover, on the screen entry form you may be using multiple tabs for a single record, and then print them stacked vertically (or not at all) on paper.

I'll have to mull this over before I can think up a reasonable solution. This gets further complicated by the fact that Revolution isn't exactly generous with database metadata in terms of their length and format.

Jan Schenkel
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Quartam Reports & PDF Library for Revolution
www.quartam.com
===== The above post was imported from the old forum hosted at quartam.ning.com =====

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