Post
by golife » Mon Dec 17, 2018 6:01 pm
Well, I am quite experienced with FileMaker and I also liked the reporting tool. I had built myself a similar report generator, not finished enough to publish, but maybe...
Let me explain a bit the logic I see in creating a reporting tool that is fully based on LiveCode script.
The principle is very similar to Filemaker. There is a separate template page (LiveCode card) with a header section, a footer section and a detail section where the report layout is defined. Even, I have a section for one-page prints or many pages, a title page, a trailing page with a trailing summary and report end. There are objects that appear on each page such as page numbers or running totals and shared headers and footers.
How abstract such template page would depend on the level of user-friendliness you want to give to the user. You could have him size the various sections and create objects there just as in Filemaker, size them, style them, and whatever. The user could then save such template for future reports. What a user could not easily do is bind fields to a data source. This needs more scripting and is not automatic (or could be made automatic eventually if such functionality would also be scripted).
The detail section (as all the other sections) on the template page is a group of controls, such as fields, images, etc. that are used to later recreated them in the report and fill them with data received from any data source, database, or even just single entries by the user. So, those fields and other controls are then bound to the data source.
Now, when the report is running, you have to script the number of details as well as header and footer sections that fit on the first page and all following pages depending on the size of the paper (here it is mainly A4). You also have to script when there is a page break and where you want this page break to occur. It is a bit more complicated when the page break would happen inside of a record as in my case, a record may have a lengthy report field (for example a long list of product details) and the height of such field varies. If this can be avoided, it is not that difficult.
You can also script a running total, a page total (I could not do this in Filemaker) and I could even accommodate different areas where the report would place product photos and size them automatically.
The great news here is that you could first create "pages" using the card metaphor and simply print everything inside LiveCode on cards with the size of your paper. You would have a virtual report that you can still adjust (for example have manually adjusted page breaks) and a correct page numbering.
This is not as easily possible in Filemaker as you do not really know how the printed report will look like depending on the output media, printer, etc. The "preview" in Filemaker does not tell the real situation. In LiveCode, you really know how each page will look like.
The limit here is the limit of cards or the limit of handling that many cards, maybe 1000 cards/pages. For lengthy reports, I would just print them without first rendering them as pages in LiveCode, just creating each page in memory, placing it on a separate "report" card, and then printing the card.
LiveCode is a fantastic tool that really allows you creating a reporting "engine" -- even much better than in Filemaker I believe--, but for whatever reason, since Quartam went silent, there has never been a genuine and multi-purpose reporting tool. (There are reporting tools on the database side that can be used, or data is exported from LiveCode to other reporting tools). But all that is not within the LiveCode ecosphere.
So, actually, there is nothing in the reporting engine of Filemaker that could not be done in LiveCode with the exception, that fields in LiveCode are not database fields by themselves, but have to be programmed to receive data.
In a sense, such reporting tool bears some similarities with the DG (data grid) in LiveCode. It would not keep the records in the boundaries of a grid but spread them out to LiveCode cards (pages) or at least onto one page that will be rebuilt for each set of records fitting in.
Also, it is possible to define groups of records and grouping them with title, subtitle and sub summary sections. It just requires more scripting. Only, we have here the freedom to chose how such groups and subgroups are handled and on which sets of data they are defined in an SQL database or whatever other data source. This is not that easy, but also doable.
All this can be as simple or complex as you want. Some medium level scripting experience is required though. I am not the master of LiveCode scripting.
It is just a time constraint that I was not able to share at least the basics of such engine. I think it would be worthwhile creating such a tool for multi-purpose printing.
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So, the main principle is to define a "record" of data containers (fields, images, graphics) and group it. Then copy that template group to the page in the order you want and the way you want the records to appear. Then use the template group to copy it one below the other in the given order and fill the containers (fields, etc.) inside each newly created group with the data. Then you print it. Afterwards, you can delete all the records and recreate them again.
You can really create any type of report you want and print it as PDF or on any printer.
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