[POOL] Valentina Reports. Ideas? Wishes?

[Thorsten Hohage]

Hi Ruslan,

On 2008-03-21, at 10:10, Ruslan Zasukhin wrote:

> I want discuss this point.
I must admit I simply don't get behind all the questions or better why  
you asked this questions, but try to give answers and my point of view.



> * Do you want to have good Valentina Reports feature available as in
> Valentina Studio (designer) so in ADKs - embedded report engine?
My first reaction: Of course yes, what other way could exist to use  
"Valentina Reports"?

I think for all further discussions we must decide between

a) report design

b) report "usage" - mean on screen, printing, ...


Of course almost all (of my) customers asked for options to chance  
delivered reports later on their own, so they are able to change a  
phone number, w/o paying me again. And some other reporting tools  
offers possible to not only include a report engine, but a reoprt  
designer, too. IMHO this is not necessary for the first versions,  
because if a customer wants to change reports he could buy VStudio -  
beside the fact, that an included report designer could be restricted  
much more by a developer.

So all my further is only about a report engine in the sense of  
"using" and not "designing".


> * what tasks you could solve having such feature?
All printing and reporting tasks? Sorry, I don't get the quesiton.  
Most if not all of the development tools that can be used with  
Valentina simply missed a reporting engine.

Good samples for IDE WITH reporting are Omnis Studio, all the Windows  
tools based on Chrystal Reports (e.g. VB) and even FileMaker and 4D.  
There you can simply design a report, an invoice, ... like you design  
a window, link to data, generate on screen and print results.

So using "Valentina Reports" I simply expect this. Using "VStudio Pro"  
to define my reports, deploy them and a customer is able to print  
everything he wants to print.


> * what features must have such Reports to be able solve your tasks?
First of all and the most important point: CORRECT printing on every  
printer a customer have in his office, on Windows and Mac. (This  
especially on all these "nice" Windows printer!) - IMHO this is not an  
easy task, when seeing how much applications simply failed on this  
requirement!

2. It's absolutely necessary to have a simple "print to screen"  
feature, where I can EVERY report see on the screen even w/o printing  
it after.

3. Variable sections in a report. I define a "single line" text area  
and if there are 200 lines, then everything must smart grow with it.  
The other way "shrink to fit" is nice, but not as good as growing.  
Because with growing you didn't need to guess how many lines will be  
maximum.

4. All this fancy "math" stuff like sum, avg, ... - btw. summaries in  
footer / header woud be really nice

5. Both ways of mass printing. When printing a letter e.g. to 10000  
customers it would be nice to print 1 page per addressee OR to  
generate this big one (pdf-) document I can hand over to a printing  
service center.



> Anything you can comments on this
I hope this email is a good start, perhaps during a further discussion  
I will come up with more details.


Btw. HAPPY EASTER to all!


regards

Thorsten Hohage
--
objectmanufactur.com - Hamburg,Germany