Kexi reports based on shapes, form letters, diagrams using data sources (was: Re: Review Request: New shape for 1-D and 2-D barcodes)

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 15 March 2012 16:52, Friedrich W. H. Kossebau <kossebau at kde.org> wrote:
> Am Montag, 12. März 2012, 08:40:13 schrieb Adam Pigg:
>> Kexi could do with an implementation of barcodes based on this, becuase the
>> current version is hand-built, not using any library, and while it is
>> assumed to work, its certainly not backed up with anything fully tested.
>
> Hm, I still am surprised that the Kexi reports are not (yet?) also based on
> flake shapes. What is the reason for this? No one had time to start/do/finish
> work on that?

Friedrich,
Thanks for this question.
Quick answer is: they are based on openRPT, which predates flakes and
even Qt Graphics View. Also the technology is different:
reports are in-memory objects, not multiplied and serialized into a
file. Report XML for these and other reasons are not just ODTs.

>
> Could doing this perhaps be done together with implementing support for form
> letters? And as the same time as implementing support for assigning data(base)
> sources to diagrams, like database tables or sheet areas or rss feeds or other
> table like data sources (with a snapshot of the data for the case the source
> is not accessible)? At least I hope there is quite some code reuse possible
> here. Connecting to the bibliography data sources is another thing which could
> be aligned in this work. And text variables might be also extended to pull
> their data from other sources then the built-in.

This is all inependent of flakes. We have threads like this, where
someone proposed assigning SQL statement to a flake shape.
This is NOT the best integration. On the last calligra sprint I
presented and descussed areas for integration. Generating ODTs is one
of them but this is extra type of report (mail-merge like). The
standard reports are frame-based; paragraphs are not there by default.

Flake shapes can be embedded as any other objects on the canvas of course.

> I would be interested to do something here. Please tell me about any
> work/plans/experiments of yours here, otherwise I would simply start from the
> scratch on sketching how this could be done. Looking forward to meet up with
> others to discuss this then at Akademy or a Calligra sprint?

Very good, Friedrich, we can work together on this.

> BTW: The rename of Calligra Tables to Calligra Sheets makes actually quite
> some sense to me, as I often had database tables in mind when reading the name
> Calligra Tables before ;)

Yeah :)

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
 http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
 Kexi & Calligra (kexi-project.org, identi.ca/kexi, calligra-suite.org)
 KDE Software Development Platform on MS Windows (windows.kde.org)