Re: [Gnue-dev] GNUe Reports Output Markup

[Derek Neighbors]

> > I tend to agree, the only exception I can think of is in native excel 
> > format you can carry expressions as well. which is interesting, but
> > thats another conversation and not a necessity.
> 
> Hmm... interesting idea.  I'm not sure of the practicality of saving the
> formulas, but having them show up in Excel would rock a few socks. That'll
> give me something to think about in between pizza slices. It'd probably
> introduce too much overhead to be worth the few possible advantages, but
> it certainly is worth thinking about.

Um in forecasting / staffing and similar situations it just kicks butt.  
As if you bring over the forumlas opposed to the cacluated number, they 
can key into the report and have formulated fields calcuated on the fly it 
might sound dumb but give it to an account and expect donuts in the 
morning. :)

> One think the reporting engine currently supports are Structural Comments.
> They are off by default. If enabled, they place XML comments between
> elements. For example, all sections are enclosed by 
>  <!--[section:mysection]--> ... <!--[/section:mysection]-->
> and all field values would be: 
> <!--[field:myfieldname]--> field value <!--[/field:myfieldvalue]-->
> 
> I included this functionality to debug my reporting engine. But, these
> could possibly be used to include "hints". In the case of excel formula
> support, the computed value could appear as: 
> 
> <!--[formula:'field1/field2*100"]-->Computed Value <!--[/formula]-->
> 
> These comments would normally be discarded by the transformation programs,
> but, in the Excel case, we might actually put useful, optional
> meta-information there. I'm not sure how people would feel about this
> approach. 
> 
> Note that "hints" weren't my initial intention... these comments were for
> were only for debugging :) 

I love the idea.  If not in comments even if we had an extra 'attribute' 
to support this for gnumeric, starcalc, excel and other situations it 
could be interesting. From an XSLT standpoint the comment approach woudl 
work fine.

-Derek