Valentina 4 & Report Generator

[Ruslan Zasukhin]

On 1/7/09 8:48 PM, "Paul Lefebvre" <paul at logicalvue.com> wrote:

Hi Paul,

I will CC this part to Valentina beta list,
Because it start discuss nice things :-)

> 5. I don't see an actual way to *print* the report from REALbasic.
> Certainly exporting to a variety of files work fine (PrintToDisk).
> Are we supposed to use PrintToBuffer to get a graphics image and then
> put that on a Graphics object to print ourselves?  I'm not sure if
> that will work since it won't be broken by pages.  Perhaps using the
> preview method to get one page at a time to print might work.  Your
> thoughts?

As far as I remember, was agree on Valentina list, that it is quite enough
produce PDF file, which you can print.

Pages?  Note that PreviewPage( N ) and PrintToDisk( startPage, lastPage )
allow you control which page(s) to print.

PREVIEW method produce JPG, which you show to user BEFORE printing.
You should not use it for printing actually I think.
 
But if you think we must add such feature as direct printing on PRINTER,
like have Vstudio, then we can try of course... Just as for me, I see that
even Vstudio have yet this feature quote weak.

I hard image how WE can print it from OUR DLL for YOUR app, if you may  want
to have own complex print dialog in your app.

You see?

-----------------
> 6. Will you be able to support other page sizes?  In particular, US
> Legal and US tabloid would be useful.

POINT: You can REGISTER from our SUPPORT page to our MANTIS bug tracker and
add any feature request you need into VSTUDIO PRO project.


Yes we need add more standard sizes,and add support of OTHER SIZEs defined
by user. 

Igor, I believe this is quite easy. And we can store these USER formats into
our .VSP file, may be into additional Table.

> 7. I can't seem to get multiple columns to work (by setting the
> columns property on the Report properties in the designer).  It always
> previews as 1 column.

Hmm, just few days ago I self have work with this.

You must be able see this in the b15
    V4RB/Examples/Vreport/General       see REPORT_2
    
You can open this .vsp in vstudio directly.
Aha, you must run it in RB at first to generate sample db


---------------------------------
> Overall, I am *very* impressed with your report designer.  If I read  your
> pricing correctly, it looks like the report designer (as part of  VStudio) is
> included with the $299 package of V4RB.  If so, I think  you've hit on
> something big.  That's only $100 more than OTR and so  far it looks a lot
> better.  Plus that includes the single-user  ValentinaDB.

Prices on vreports do not present yet on site.

For Valentina 4.0 prices will be such:

* ANY Valentina ADK has price
            $199 for single platform
            $399 for three platforms + VStudio

* ANY Valentina ADK + REPORTS    double price
            $399 for single platform
            $799 for three platforms + Vstudio PRO

> You might also want to consider offering a SQLite to  ValentinaDB migration
> tool to help folks switch.

Well, SqlLite has few only types, so by idea if do SQL dump of db,
Then it must be LOAD into Valentina empty db


We do not consider OTR as our competitor. We know at least 2-3 really good
report tools, e.g. Famous Crystall Report, which is WIN only, for Eclipse,
linux oriented, another from Russia. But they are all VERY expensive, up to
$1500 and more. 

And all these tools connect to some OTHER DBMS, so you need pay for DBMS
also. 

In contrast, we have integrate REPORTs right into DB ENGINE, and into
VSERVER. This gives technical advantages of course.

MAY BE future we will consider enabling Valentina Reports to work with OTHER
dbs also ... But so far we not going to do this.



-------------------------
> One feature that OTR has that you may be missing:
> 
> * Using an array as a data source.

Not implemented so far, but present in our mantis as feature request.

> With OTR, I can populate a report
> manually using an array (such as data from a ListBox or data that I've
> put together myself).  This is oftentimes useful because there may be
> data you want to include in the report that would not be part of an
> SQL query.  Actually now that I think about that it may be possible to
> do it by hard-coding the values into an all-new SELECT cursor.  But
> even if that works, it won't be obvious to most.

Another way can be:
    you have Table in your DB,
    or table in special TMP, may be RAM based db

So you just insert values you need into that table,
Then use usual way.

NOTE, that currently, API of VProject and VReport class are very minimal and
yet flexible. 


Also as I remember, on TODO is feature
    Report.SetProperty( name, value )

This should allow setup values that are not in SELECT.
Right ?

-- 
Best regards,

Ruslan Zasukhin
VP Engineering and New Technology
Paradigma Software, Inc

Valentina - Joining Worlds of Information
http://www.paradigmasoft.com

[I feel the need: the need for speed]