Nine to Five Reports

[Tuviah M Snyder]

>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 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.

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 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?!

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.

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