Re: [Gnue-dev] GNUe Reports

[Patrick Bakker]

> ...Regarding possible use of GNUe for nursery software...

I'd like to. Decision will not be made for some time yet but I will
suggest it. Derek, I would appreciate it if you could give me a list of
people using GNUe in production but I have a feeling I may know the
answer to some of these situations already. For instance is it correct
to say the designer/forms work for direct access to database as of right
now but geas (application server for business logic) is being rewritten
and reports are being actively developed? For the project I'm working on
I need GEAS to be functionally and reliabily connecting to PostgreSQL
and forms. Additionally, forms may be too limiting from what I've seen
(but I would have to take a closer look before I would decide). If I
could get permission to go this route, I might be able help work on GNUe
framework first...Time will tell.

> >             Value_A         Value_B         Value_C
> > Customer 1  x               x
> > Customer 2                  x               x
> > 
> > Where Value_A is actually all possible values of another field displayed
> > in full as column headings. This is a one (customer) to many
> > relationship expanded and showing some value summarized from the 'many'
> > table.
> 
> Cross tab reporting is do able and will be supported at some point. :)

Is this situation a standard feature of cross tab reporting? I never
realized it.
 
> > - Any layer could be reusable. Not every layer would have a dynamic data
> > source.
> 
> Not sure I understand this one.

I was thinking in terms of having layers of definitions in a report.
Nothing distinct about any layer but they can ordered. An example:
- first layer could contain something like headers and footers (reusable
in multiple reports)
- the second layer could hold the report data itself
- a third layer could have a pull-quote style summary of some portion of
the data
--- however, all of this seems well-handled by XSL/XSLT...


I haven't seen FOP (http://xml.apache.org/fop) mentioned in the
archives. It may be worth a look if you haven't heard of it. Obviously,
however, since it is part of Apache, its in Java. The XSL/XSLT
recommendations look quite powerful. Are they under consideration?


Patrick.