Nine to Five Reports

[Alan Gayne]

On Saturday, May 31, 2003, at 02:41 PM, Tuviah M Snyder wrote:

>> What I eventually heard was that the RunRev people felt that all of 
>> the
>> features offered by Reports would ultimately be better implemented
>> totally within the Revolution environment - "ultimately" seeming to be
>> the operative term.
> Hi Alan. I remember talking with you at MacWorld, and look forward to
> discussing this in more detail this July.

I remember talking to you also and I'll see if I can make it there this 
July
>
> I think the big problem with writing a reports package, is coming up 
> with
> something easy enough and powerful enough that developers use it. As
> Richard stated many apps need to print custom reports, and it may be
> easier to just roll your own.

As you know, I am NOT a traditional developer, but an "empowered user" 
who developed application for my direct use in my own enterprises.  
This was the real attraction of Hypercard - it was "programming for the 
rest of us".  Having said this, I think that makes me a pretty good 
bell weather of the ease of use of Nine to Five Reports.  It WAS easy 
AND extremely intuitive.  As to it's power to make custom reports, well 
as each report document was fully scriptable, allowed fields to be 
populated by globals and able to add and change graphics on the fly 
under script control, I could usually find a way to make it print just 
about anything I ever needed.  I'm not really sure what else one might 
need but it seemed very open ended to me.  So I "rolled my own" on just 
about every report.

> RunRev 2.0 features a new report generator, a powerful and well tested
> stack based report generator, and I'm not sure how many people have 
> even
> tried it out.

I HAVE attempted to try it out.  But the current state of the 
documentation is EXTREMELY discouraging.  How about a step-b-step 
tutorial on this?  Maybe this thing CAN do most of the stuff I can do 
with Nine to Five Reports but I'll be darned if I can figure it out how 
to use it or even if it can do the job.  A little help - PLEASE!
>
> I wrote a report generator 5 years ago for MetaCard called the MetaCard
> Report Generator which featured fully customizable headers/footers,
> templates, a Full scripting API, ect, expressions, ect.
>
> http://www.xworlds.com/metacard/contributors/mcrg.htm
>
> I honestly don't know if anyone actually used it in an application, I 
> got
> little to no feedback on it, and it never went out of beta. Perhaps it
> was too complex?!

I'll try to take a look and let you know.

But Tuviah, I've SEEN some of the stuff you have done and there's no 
doubt in my mind of you technical capabilities which FAR exceed my own. 
  I don't understand why you just don't look at the way things were done 
in Nine to Five Reports (an admittedly dead product which I believe is 
officially closing down at the end of June) and use THAT as a guide for 
implement a similar feature set in a Rev based report generator.  I am 
almost CERTAIN that you are capable of this.
>
> So I've moved to the conclusion that what we need is a report generator
> based on SQL along the lines of Crystal Reports, DBReports, and various
> other reporting packages, or even perhaps tighter integration with such
> packages. Along with things like step by step Query Wizards, prebuilt
> Templates, possible support for stacks as data sources, an Open
> extensible scripting API so developers can write their own printing
> modules, and additional integration with local databases
> (Access/Valentina) perhaps we can have the ultimate cross platform 
> report
> generator in Rev.

Initially, it doesn't have to be "the ultimate", it just has to be 
usable, affordable and expandable.  If it is written in Rev it will 
automatically be expandable, no?

Alan

> Tuviah Snyder <tuviah at runrev.com> <http://www.runrev.com/>
> Runtime Revolution Limited - Software at the Speed of Thought
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