[reportlab-users] Geraldo

[Marinho Brandao]

Hi Dinu,

yes, "report" is an expression that can have many meanings.

ReportLab uses the word "report" meaning "write things on a blank
page, as a canvas".

but in ERPs, CRMs and others corporate softwares, "report" means "data
output, with header, footer, summary, etc.". This topic is for
softwares like Jasper, Crystal Reports, ReportBuilder, QuickReport,
FastReport, ZReport, etc. and Geraldo is a new one on this market.

about Report x SubReport, you have to think that a "Report" is the
main one, driven by a detail band, that is rendered from a list of
objects from the attribute "queryset".

SubReport is a child list. If you are printing a Purchase form, you
have a Report, but a Purchase has Bills and Products... then you can
have 2 SubReports: a list of Bills and a list of Products.

In other hand, you can need a way to group data by some fields. Then
you have ReportGroup. Example: if you are printing a list of
Customers, maybe you want to group them by their types (i.e.: Good
Customer, Ordinary Customer, Bad Customer, etc)

Do you follow me?

A band is not an easy thing to explain to who is not used to use
report engines... but you can understand a band as a row in the report
with a defined job.

Example: the Page Header Band is a row with widgets an graphic
elements that will be printed on the top of all pages (to print the
report title, page number, etc.).... the Page Footer is exactly the
same, but will be printed on the page footer... the Detail Band is the
main one, because it is printed for each object in the list (the
attribute "queryset"), etc...

Geraldo has other features, aggregation fields (i.e.: to sum up a
field value or to count the total of objects in a list, etc), system
fields (i.e. printing date/time, page number, page count, etc.)

please check the docs for more details:

http://geraldo.sourceforge.net/


:)


2009/7/8 Dinu Gherman <gherman at darwin.in-berlin.de>:

> Marinho Brandao:

>

>> [...] but Geraldo is not only that. Geraldo make things like bands,

>> subreports, page header/footer, report begin/end, data driving grids,

>> etc... and output files in PDF (using ReportLab) and Text formats (and

>> in a near future, also to ODF Docs and Sheets).

>

>

> Hi Marinho,

>

> thanks for the explanation! Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems to me

> like your implicit definition of the term "report" is that of a

> rectangular area (mostly table-like) with data-like "stuff" inside.

> That would make sense given how you use the term "subreport". I

> think I'm probably wrong, at least to some degree, but I'd much

> appreciate some clarification of the terms "report/subreport" as

> well as "band" and "grid" in this context.

>

> BTW, I've seen recently a presentation on JasperReports and was im-

> pressed with their interactive tools. Pitty, RL hasn't developped

> into that area, at least not with public tools, AFAIK.

>

> Regards,

>

> Dinu

>

> PS: It would be nice to see some really running testsuite instead

> of the ASCII text in the distribution. Python's unittest package

> is great for doing this...

>

> ......................................................................

> Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/dinugherman

>

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-- 
Marinho Brandão (José Mário)
http://marinhobrandao.com/