Re: [Gnue-dev] GNUe Reports and xmlns, oh my!

[Peter Sullivan]

On Fri, 22 Mar 2002 00:26:48 Jason Cater wrote:
> When I read the first email, I was thinking to myself, "What is this crazy
> Brit talking about?"

Hey, that's *MISTER* crazy Brit to you, bud ;-)

> Then, with the arrival of your second email,  I realized this parallels
> one of my wishlist items: "skinnable" (or templated) reports. I would say
> that 80-90% of all my reports at NCS look identical.  I'd like to create a
> few "formatting templates" that describe the physical layout of reports
> (letter size; NCS logo; header information with page number, date, title
> locations; et al)

I *think* we are talking about slightly different levels of abstraction. 
I am
initially talking about abstracting the dataset/results of the query 
from the 
output/formatting - which to an extent Reports must do already, no? 
(I'm assuming you don't have to redesign a report from scratch every 
time 
you want to refresh the data.) You seemed to have moved on to the next 
level of abstracting the 'cosmetic' formatting from the 'semantic' 
formatting.

Incidentally, this would be a killer feature, in that most ERP packages 
(i.e. all of the ones I've seen) have quite powerful but very standard 
reports for things like Financials - usually just straight ASCII output. 

There are an awful lot of consultants out there making silly day-rates 
for
basically re-writing existing ASCII reports in a (usually third-party) 
graphical reporting package (your choice of Crystal Reports, Business 
Objects, Cognos Impromptu, Oracle Discoverer or whatever), all because 
the budget managers and/or Finance Director can't be persuaded to look 
at
anything that isn't "pretty." This in itself is usally an advance over 
the
previous way of doing things, which often involved manually re-keying 
the 
ASCII text into a well known spreadsheet package from Redmond...

-- 
Peter Sullivan <address@hidden>