Pablo,
> Hi all , I want to know how to make reports in Dolphin.
> For example, having a collection of invoices I want to create a report
which
> shows these invoices and totalize taxes or others imports breaking these
by
> client by invoice type ,etc.
> I want to display the report and also printing it. I believe that RichText
> or PDF files are the better formats.
Some years ago Jerry Bell did a port of SPDF to Dolphin; SPDF is a
(apparently) rather complete PDF writer. I don't know if he's done any
further work on it, or has it available anywhere on the web. I still have a
copy (that I've done nothing with except to verify that it still passes its
self-tests on Dolphin5), so drop me a line if you'd like a copy. If there's
any general interest then I could add it to my website.
As far as printing and print preview goes, SPDF won't help. One option (if
you have the time and inclination) would be to use Dolphin's external
interfacing to wrap the free Ghostscript PostScript/PDF viewer and printer.
I've been wanting to have a hack at that myself for ages, but have never got
much further than creating an empty .PAC file ;-) From the documentation,
it looks as if it'd be pretty easy if you are used to the external
interfacing -- there aren't many functions and structures to wrap.
If you'd rather use RTF, then there are a couple of RTF writers around. I
don't have the links anymore. The advantage of RTF would be that you could
use a normal rich text component to display it (provided it didn't use too
many of RTF's features), and Ian's stuff would print it.
However, I think that dumping the data to a database and then using an
off-the-shelf report writer might be a better bet, since then your users
would be able to mess with the formatting, etc, themselves.
-- chris
P.S. I've just found one of the RTF writers I was thinking of at:
http://www.object-arts.com/wiki/html/Dolphin/DolphinGoodiesRichTextWriter.htm -- c
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