ron@DRD.Com (Ron Madurski) (11/20/90)
We use Rbase to store daily operations data for the drilling industry. We are in need of a package that will allow our software (ie., it must be linkable with the rest of our software, written in C) to output "pretty" reports. We need the ability to draw lines, boxes, different font sizes, shading (w/ and w/out text in shaded areas), compressed print adjacent to normal print, the ability to do calculations would be helpful, and a host of other options, most of which are not absolutely necessary but would be helpful. One of the most important aspects of the report generator should be easy manipulation of the fields contained in the report, this is the current bottleneck in our method. I have found two packages that do what we want, to a certain extent. One called 4Real allows forms to be created, and easily linked into the programs. It does not do any of the fancy page formatting that we would require. The other package is called dbPublisher. It sounds like it will do what we need, but it is expensive. Any comments suggestions or pointers to locations with more information would be highly appreciated. Thanks, ron@drd.com -- ron@DRD.Com uunet!apctrc!drd!ron
callisto@blake.u.washington.edu (Finn) (11/20/90)
In article <1990Nov19.210354.1516@DRD.Com> ron@DRD.Com (Ron Madurski) writes: >We use Rbase to store daily operations data for the drilling industry. >We are in need of a package that will allow our software (ie., it must >be linkable with the rest of our software, written in C) to output >"pretty" reports. We need the ability to draw lines, boxes, different ..(lots of stuff hacked out) > The other package is called dbPublisher. It sounds like it >will do what we need, but it is expensive. I have done "pretty publishing from inside of rbase (compressed print, wierd font's and barcodes, all on laserprinter labels). The trick is to build all of the printer control codes yourself and dump them out to the printer. It is time consuming. It is a headachae, but if you cannot find something on the market that does what you need, it can be done. RE: your dbPublisher... "expensive" is a relative term. If you look at what it would cost to pay a programmer to write something custom, almost anything is cheap. Getting data out of a database and onto a page in fancy formats and fonts with boxes and so forth is far from simple, figure on a couple of weeks for a real fast hack if the programmer already knows your database and printer. Another possible solution is to dump the data you wish to print out of the database and pull it into your favorite spreadsheet. I've had real good luck using Excel's charts and reports for generating fancy reports. Excel is designed so that an idiot can use it, so even I can make changes to reports in a few minutes. (As opposed to hours modifying a custom report generator) Once you get the report going manually, you can probably string together rbase code, batch files, and/or spreadsheet macros to automate the report publishing process. My experience is with Excel, but most of the spreadsheets have similar report generating features.