On Saturday, May 31, 2003, at 02:41 PM, Tuviah M Snyder wrote:
What I eventually heard was that the RunRev people felt that all of the
features offered by Reports would ultimately be better implemented
totally within the Revolution environment - "ultimately" seeming to be
the operative term.Hi Alan. I remember talking with you at MacWorld, and look forward to discussing this in more detail this July.
I remember talking to you also and I'll see if I can make it there this July
I think the big problem with writing a reports package, is coming up with
something easy enough and powerful enough that developers use it. As
Richard stated many apps need to print custom reports, and it may be
easier to just roll your own.
As you know, I am NOT a traditional developer, but an "empowered user" who developed application for my direct use in my own enterprises. This was the real attraction of Hypercard - it was "programming for the rest of us". Having said this, I think that makes me a pretty good bell weather of the ease of use of Nine to Five Reports. It WAS easy AND extremely intuitive. As to it's power to make custom reports, well as each report document was fully scriptable, allowed fields to be populated by globals and able to add and change graphics on the fly under script control, I could usually find a way to make it print just about anything I ever needed. I'm not really sure what else one might need but it seemed very open ended to me. So I "rolled my own" on just about every report.
RunRev 2.0 features a new report generator, a powerful and well tested
stack based report generator, and I'm not sure how many people have even
tried it out.
I HAVE attempted to try it out. But the current state of the documentation is EXTREMELY discouraging. How about a step-b-step tutorial on this? Maybe this thing CAN do most of the stuff I can do with Nine to Five Reports but I'll be darned if I can figure it out how to use it or even if it can do the job. A little help - PLEASE!
I wrote a report generator 5 years ago for MetaCard called the MetaCard Report Generator which featured fully customizable headers/footers, templates, a Full scripting API, ect, expressions, ect.
http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/contributors/mcrg.htm
I honestly don't know if anyone actually used it in an application, I got
little to no feedback on it, and it never went out of beta. Perhaps it
was too complex?!
I'll try to take a look and let you know.
But Tuviah, I've SEEN some of the stuff you have done and there's no doubt in my mind of you technical capabilities which FAR exceed my own. I don't understand why you just don't look at the way things were done in Nine to Five Reports (an admittedly dead product which I believe is officially closing down at the end of June) and use THAT as a guide for implement a similar feature set in a Rev based report generator. I am almost CERTAIN that you are capable of this.
So I've moved to the conclusion that what we need is a report generator
based on SQL along the lines of Crystal Reports, DBReports, and various
other reporting packages, or even perhaps tighter integration with such
packages. Along with things like step by step Query Wizards, prebuilt
Templates, possible support for stacks as data sources, an Open
extensible scripting API so developers can write their own printing
modules, and additional integration with local databases
(Access/Valentina) perhaps we can have the ultimate cross platform report
generator in Rev.
Initially, it doesn't have to be "the ultimate", it just has to be usable, affordable and expandable. If it is written in Rev it will automatically be expandable, no?
Alan
Tuviah Snyder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.runrev.com/> Runtime Revolution Limited - Software at the Speed of Thought _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
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