Lazarus, report and CGI

[derox]

Ooohh! That sounds very nice Graeme! Any idea on when your friend will tell you if you can release it?

[Graeme]

I don't have write access to the Free Pascal SVN repositories. The release of fpReport is totally up to Michael. I was only hired to develop it.

[derox]

Please keep us updated in this post if wheter or not it gets released, and when.

[Graeme]

I asked Michael if he has a release roadmap for fpReport. We had some discussion, and he decided it would be best to release fpReport with a working visual report designer. The idea is that without a visual report designer the experience might not be as positive as we would hope - we want the best experience possible from the start. So for a more "complete" solution, the fpReport release is delayed slightly until we have a working visual report designer implemented. That means a couple weeks delay.

[xinyiman]

No problem. So I would say at most a month and should be released right?

[Graeme]

Yes, that's the timeframe we are looking at.

[Pascal]

I've also implemented a few report export renderers for PDF, PNG (via AggPas - thus giving high quality graphics), PNG (via fpImage/fpCanvas), a LCL Canvas render (ideal for print preview dialogs - two are included) and a fpGUI Canvas render (a print preview dialog). Also implemented (because it was faster than writing a Visual Report Designer) is a reporting unit that can convert report designs from Stimulsoft to fpReport. fpReport's native file format is JSON - it can read and write report designs.

Graeme,

does/will your PDF export renderer support PDF/A?

[Graeme]

does/will your PDF export renderer support PDF/A?

It doesn't yet, but I would like to add it at some point. It shouldn't be hard to do though as the changes are minimal.

[valdir.marcos]

Hi Graeme.

Will fpReport have filters to export to Microsoft Excel and/or LibreOffice Calc files? Export to HTML files? Save to and restore from its own data files?

Will it have a draft filter to printers that do not have a page size such as POS (Point of Sale) printers or impact printers?

The fpReport visual report designer will be as simple and as easy as FortesReport and QuickReport?

Will some different reports be able to be concatenated to generate only one print job, sharing the sequence of pages?

Will messages and text components be easily translated into other languages according to the environment or manual setting?

Thanks.

[Graeme]

Will fpReport have filters to export to Microsoft Excel and/or LibreOffice Calc files? Export to HTML files? Save to and restore from its own data files?

Yes, it currently has export filters, and the community can create more as needed. I've implement exporting to various images (via FPImage), export to PNG with high quality rendering (via AggPas), exporting to PDF (our primary goal using fcl-pdf), exporting to LCL Canvas (used for Print Preview), export to fpGUI Canvas (used for Print Preview), and export to HTML (we fake it by exporting to a image and then generating a HTML file than displays that image).

And yes, report designs can be created via code, or streamed (read & write) via its native file format JSON. I also implemented a "difference streamer", where you can define a base report, and fpReport will only store differences based on that report. So the design time size of descendant reports can be greatly reduced is there was only minor changes.

Will it have a draft filter to printers that do not have a page size such as POS (Point of Sale) printers or impact printers?

I'm not sure what that entails as I've never worked on POS printers before. I can say that fpReport has a Paper Manager with predefined standard paper sizes. There is also a custom paper size, where you can define anything you want. I guess for POS systems  one could do a basic line height calculation, then multiply that by the number of data items plus the header, footer, and set that as the page height. I really don't know. :-/

The fpReport visual report designer will be as simple and as easy as FortesReport and QuickReport?

Yes, and should be much better than the LazReport Designer.

Will some different reports be able to be concatenated to generate only one print job, sharing the sequence of pages?

Yes, multiple pages can be defined in a single report, and each page can report from different datasets (database dataset or user defined data).  You can also have multiple data bands in a single page that reports from the same dataset or multiple data sets - think sub-reports.

Will messages and text components be easily translated into other languages according to the environment or manual setting?

Localization of reports are up to the application generating the report. It's not the job of the report engine itself.

[valdir.marcos]

The fpReport visual report designer will be as simple and as easy as FortesReport and QuickReport?

Yes, and should be much better than the LazReport Designer.

Thanks Graeme for all the answers and the great job on fpReport.

[marcinh]

Any chance to see fpReport this year ?

[Graeme]

I don't know. The release scheduling is not up to me.

[Pascal]

Any news on fpReport?

[Graeme]

No news sorry. I do know one or two people have asked Michael directly if they could get a “test” copy in the mean time, which he did. So maybe that’s an option for you.