[reportlab-users] Tables

Henning von Bargen reportlab-users@reportlab.com
Fri, 17 Oct 2003 13:40:40 +0200


Hi all,

just as Andy and Robin, I have a project deadline in front and no time right
now.
It seems there are a lot of good ideas from several people for table
rendering.
[In my project, I'm using reportlab as a replacement for Oracle reports
because it is much more flexible].
So I'll wait for Rasjid Wilcox results first.
I'll post my patches for Paragraphs and my LongTable class in November.

Here's some general ideas for Tables:
* Maybe there should be different classes for small tables, long tables,
long and wide tables.
* Perhaps the Table class could be rewritten as an abstract base class
   for different implementation classes (with different design goals)  like
LongTable, FancyTable etc. 
* Let the user choose one of the implementation classes.
* However the different rendering algorithms for long/wide tables will work,
they should all
  have a complexity better than c=O((rows*cols)^2) because c would make the
algorithm too slow for real world use.
* Row/Column spanning is essential for tables, so all implementations should
support it.

Just like Rasjid, I'm planning to use RL for generating Database reports,
and I think if we join our effors we could make it better than Oracle
Reports or Crystal reports
(at least for PDF generation).

Henning