Re: [reportlab-users] database reporting

[Silke]

To be honest, I think there isn't any DB reporting tool written in Python comparable to the best commercial report design tools.

To create just tabular listings, Reportlab's LongTable is fine (I should know, because I developed the patch). For languages with long words, you should use Wordaxe paragraphs with auto hyphenation inside the cells to avoid wasting space. However, a cell must not be longer than one page. For very long text, you could try to split it into paragraphs with less than 200 chars and use several table rows then.

For more sophisticated reports, I recommend something like Eclipse BIRT - unfortunately, that's Java and not Python, but nobody's perfect.

HTH
Henning
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[Gary Nutbeam]

You could try the report writing features of Dabo (which uses reportlab
to generate it's output), a desktop-centric open source database dev
tool for python.

http://www.dabodev.com

[Andy Robinson]

I just wonder if anyone actually WANTS to do really long
grouped/banded database reports, or if that's just what the tools have
encouraged? IMHO when things get long, you may be better to think
about making a "book" with tables of contents, different presentations
of information, and not everything in tables. In the past 12 years in
business, I haven't met a customer who disagrees. At which point,
ReportLab makes it all possible.

- Andy

--
Andy Robinson
Managing Director
ReportLab Europe Ltd.
Thornton House, Thornton Road, Wimbledon, London SW19 4NG, UK
Tel +44-20-8405-6420

[Paul McNett]

On 6/3/13 3:18 PM, Andy Robinson wrote:
> I just wonder if anyone actually WANTS to do really long
> grouped/banded database reports, or if that's just what the tools have
> encouraged? IMHO when things get long, you may be better to think
> about making a "book" with tables of contents, different presentations
> of information, and not everything in tables. In the past 12 years in
> business, I haven't met a customer who disagrees. At which point,
> ReportLab makes it all possible.

I really like the paradigm of reporting bands (group header/footer for x number of
groups, with absolute or dynamic sizing of objects within each band, and a single
detail band, and objects that can be suppressed and dynamically formatted.

Needing long flowing text that spans pages isn't frequently needed, but it does come
up from time to time. Usually, it's long flowing text of 1-10 lines or so, and you
want the detail from the next record to come right underneath and sometimes that
record's long text will need to flow to the next page because it started near the
bottom of the prior page.

I'm not claiming Dabo's reportwriter is the answer to all needs, but IMHO it does
fill the need of database-banded reports like Crystal Reports, but simpler, more
flexible, and not tightly bound to the database.

The report designer is simplistic, doesn't have all the bells and whistles, and
corner cases are still a bit buggy, but for the most part it does the job. I usually
visually design my reports with the designer and then depending on the task modify
them with vim (it's pretty nicely-formatted and self-explanatory xml) or with the
designer when changes need to be made.

Thanks to ReportLab, I got the banded reporting engine I wanted!
Paul