Hi,
I'm writing a fairly large project in wxPython (thanks to all involved
in making a great toolkit, btw!). It's a database front-end application
for a hospital. I'm kind of new to GUI programming, so I'm having to
learn the tricks...
Now I find that my application needs to generate reports. Reports are
basically pretty-printed, paginated tables with labels, headers and
values.
In the proprietary world, I see people are generating such things with
specialized tools like Crystal Reports. I'm hoping to do my reports
using available open source technologies only, which can run on Linux.
My question is: how to do that without reinventing too many wheels?
The basic features I need are something like:
- table layout
- advanced tables: merged cells are a requisite; vertical text support
would be nice
- print preview and print, with nice print quality for tables
- paginated output: headers, footers, don't break a page in the middle
of a row
From what I can see, the TablePrint module doesn't quite fit the job. It
feels much like a work in progress, doesn't do merged cells, and it's
very slow (at least under Linux/GTK).
One option I can see is generating html from the application from
templates, and then using wxHtmlWindow and wxHtmlEasyPrinter to preview
and print it. It seems like it can work, but if I want to open and
close the tables with a nice horizontal line at the start and end of
each page, it looks like I have to generate each of the HTML pages
separately and use a low-level wxHtmlDCRenderer to do each page, right?
Another option would be to generate a file with the data and let some
external application (LaTeX + kviewshell, or some spreadsheet, or some
specialized report tool) do the rest of the job. Does anyone know of
any production-quality open source reporting tools?
I don't mind hacking a bit, but I mostly want my code to be simple and
maintainable, so I'd rather use something that is already existing, and
which people are using. Surely I can't be the only wxPython user who
needs a PHB-friendly report, no?
Thanks,
Roger
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