Webware for Python

--- Geoffrey Talvola <gtalvola@...> wrote:

> You might try to produce a "printer-friendly" version of your HTML
> reports.
> You can use the CSS style "page-break-before: always" on a <P> tag to
> force
> page breaks where needed.  For instance, if your report consists of a
> large
> HTML table, you may determine through trial and error that you can
> comfortably fit 20 rows on one page.  Then split up the table into
> multiple
> tables with no more than 20 rows per table and insert <p
> style="page-break-before: always"> in between each one.  This will
> require a
> bit of experimenting and tweaking with different browsers to get it
> right,
> and it may not always work 100% correctly, but it may be good enough
> depending on your use case.
>  
> You can have a "view" version of the report in which all of the data
> is
> contained within one large table for online use, and provide a link
> to a
> "printable" version of the report in which you split up the tables to
> fit
> one per page, strip out navigation links, etc.
>  
> The nice thing about this is that the HTML reports will probably be
> much
> nicer to use online than a PDF report would (does anyone actually
> like
> viewing reports online using a PDF viewer?).  They probably won't
> look as
> nice when printed though.
>  
> I've used this method with some success -- it's not perfect but given
> the
> choice between nice-for-printing PDF reports that are a pain to use
> online,
> and acceptable-printing HTML reports that are a pleasure to use
> online, I
> prefer the second choice.
>  
> - Geoff
> 
> 

If you are using Firefox (and maybe the latest Netscape and Mozilla),
there is support for the THEAD, TFOOTER, and TBODY tags.  Just by
wrapping the heading rows of a table in thead, Firefox will print the
heading rows on subsequent pages -- no need to use the
page-break-before method on large tables.  This, combined with liberal
use of "dispay: none;" under the "media print" section to eliminate the
printing of buttons and other things not relevant on a printed page
creates printed output close to perfect.

Firefox deserves another plug here; if you are not using Firefox to
develop your application's html, you are missing out on some great
tools.  There are several fantastic developer extensions (click
Extensions under the Firefox Tools menu).  I use the Web Developer,
HTML Validator, and View Formatted Source extensions every day.

Roger Haase


		
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 
http://mail.yahoo.com

Eduardo Elgueta wrote:
> Other problem the users complain about, is table column width varies
> from one page to the other, which is obvious, given the way browsers
> render html (they don't unserstand that, either :-( ). Does anybody
> knows if theres a CSS style or HTML property I can use to force the
> column width no matter what? word wrapping is acceptable.    
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ed.

You should be able to force a column to be fixed width by applying a style
like "width: 300px" to all of the <td> elements that make up the column.

- Geoff

Pagination is always going to be a problem with webpages, so far
browsers really don't make inserting page breaks an easy task.  If what
you want is a Crystal Reports like product why not use datavision
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/datavision) its free and works ok.  
Jose

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [Webware-discuss] Printing from web application
> From: Eduardo Elgueta <eelgueta@...>
> Date: Tue, September 20, 2005 12:07 pm
> To: webware-discuss@...
> 
>       Hi All,
>  
>  I have a small webware application in which I need to produce reports to be printed. Right now, html reports produce poor results (pagination is not constant).
>  
>  I bigger companies, we use Crystal Reports, but this is a small non-for-profit organization, so we can't afford commercial software.
>  
>  What are you guys using?
>  
>  I was checking out reportlab, but it seems a lot of work, and I couldn't find tables support.
>  
>  Best regards,
>  
>  Ed.
>

Eduardo Elgueta wrote:
> The reportlab/pdf solution doesn't seem quite easy to implement, just as 
> I thought. Besides, I see a lot of trouble ahead 
> downloading/compiling/configuring/learning reportlab and a bunch of 
> other support libraries.

Just to make this clear again, ReportLab is really not difficult.
No need to compile or configure anything.
There is also a howto for integrating with Webware in the Wiki at:
http://wiki.w4py.org/pdf-creation-with-reportlab.html

I'm sure that creating CSS page styles that work with all browsers will 
be a lot more cumbersome than creating PDF with ReportLab. But of course 
it will also depends on the particular reports you want to create and 
the demands you make to the quality of the output.

By the way, it would be nice if someone could summarize discussions such 
  as this one on the Wiki, too.

-- Christoph

On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 17:07:12 -0400, Eduardo Elgueta <eelgueta@...> 
wrote:

>Thank you all for your answers.
>
>The reportlab/pdf solution doesn't seem quite easy to implement, just as 
>I thought. Besides, I see a lot of trouble ahead 
>downloading/compiling/configuring/learning reportlab and a bunch of 
>other support libraries.
>


I think you are dramatically overestimating the effort involved.  
Reportlab is a fabulous solution for web printing, in part because one 
can guarantee that the output looks the same for every user of your web 
site, regardless of what operating system or browser they are using.

There is really no compilation or configuration to be done.  Reportlab 
is entirely Python (with the exception of one optional DLL, which can be 
downloaded in binary form), and configuration consists of "python 
setup.py install".

There is no free lunch, of course.  There is no "magic reporting fairy" 
who can wave her magic wand and instantly give you a reporting 
solution.  However, there are a bundle of excellent samples in the 
Reportlab distribution, and the user community on the mailing list 
(http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/reportlab-users) is 
fantastic.  One of my favorite samples is a simple script which 
colorizes and "pretty-prints" Python code.  I use it regularly.

HTML is about 80% of the way to being the perfect report generation 
language, but that missing 20% just make it way too unpredictable for 
general use.  PDFs solve that problem, and Reportlab is a great way to 
create PDFs.

You have to make your own decisions, of course, but I don't think you 
should discard Reportlab until you've tried it a couple of times.

-- 
Tim Roberts, timr@...
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

Tim Roberts wrote:
> HTML is about 80% of the way to being the perfect report generation 
> language, but that missing 20% just make it way too unpredictable for 
> general use.  PDFs solve that problem, and Reportlab is a great way to 
> create PDFs.

Of course (to reiterate myself) if you are converting HTML to PDF on the 
server, it's mostly predictable.  Of course, if you can't find *any* 
HTML->PDF converter that is predictable in the ways you want (e.g., 
pagination) then it's a problem.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb@...  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org

Reportlab will do all of that for you automatically. Check out the high
level PLATYPUS engine on pg. 58 of the user guide:
http://reportlab.org/os_documentation.html

It even terms your documents contents as "Flowables" because they get
"flowed" into the document. It will handle page and table breaks for
you.

-Seth

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 14:44 -0400, Eduardo Elgueta wrote:
> Tim,
> 
> Thank you for your feed-back.
> 
> I was looking for a report solution. From what I've seen of reportlab,
> it's intended to be used as a page layout tool. I mean, (it seems) I
> have to do pagination, table splitting and all of those tedious work.
> Not that different from what I already have with pure simple html. I
> think it's to much work switching from a flow display (html) to a
> position based display (reportlab). I'm probably wrong on this, but
> that's what I saw in the documentation.
> 
> May be you can point me to a simple report sample done with reportlab.
> The samples I saw at reportlab's site are single page form oriented,
> not multipage reports.
> 
> Ed.
> 
> 
> Tim Roberts escribió: 
> > On Tue, 20 Sep 2005 17:07:12 -0400, Eduardo Elgueta
> > <eelgueta@...> wrote: 
> > 
> > > Thank you all for your answers. 
> > > 
> > > The reportlab/pdf solution doesn't seem quite easy to implement,
> > > just as I thought. Besides, I see a lot of trouble ahead
> > > downloading/compiling/configuring/learning reportlab and a bunch
> > > of other support libraries. 
> > > 
> > 
> > 
> > I think you are dramatically overestimating the effort involved.
> > Reportlab is a fabulous solution for web printing, in part because
> > one can guarantee that the output looks the same for every user of
> > your web site, regardless of what operating system or browser they
> > are using. 
> > 
> > There is really no compilation or configuration to be done.
> > Reportlab is entirely Python (with the exception of one optional
> > DLL, which can be downloaded in binary form), and configuration
> > consists of "python setup.py install". 
> > 
> > There is no free lunch, of course.  There is no "magic reporting
> > fairy" who can wave her magic wand and instantly give you a
> > reporting solution.  However, there are a bundle of excellent
> > samples in the Reportlab distribution, and the user community on the
> > mailing list
> > (http://two.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/reportlab-users) is
> > fantastic.  One of my favorite samples is a simple script which
> > colorizes and "pretty-prints" Python code.  I use it regularly. 
> > 
> > HTML is about 80% of the way to being the perfect report generation
> > language, but that missing 20% just make it way too unpredictable
> > for general use.  PDFs solve that problem, and Reportlab is a great
> > way to create PDFs. 
> > 
> > You have to make your own decisions, of course, but I don't think
> > you should discard Reportlab until you've tried it a couple of
> > times. 
> > 
> 
> -- 
> Eduardo Elgueta
> Senior Consultant
> Navix
> 
> correo/email: eelgueta@...
> teléfono/phone: +56 (2) 381-1467
> celular/mobile: +56 (9) 821-0033
> web: http://www.navix.cl
> 
> Av. Once de Septiembre 1945 Of. 502
> Providencia 750-0503
> Santiago, Chile
-- 
Seth Remington
SaberLogic, LLC
661-B Weber Drive
Wadsworth, Ohio 44281
Phone: (330)335-6442
Fax: (330)336-8559

Hi,

Eduardo Elgueta schrieb:

> I was looking for a report solution. From what I've seen of reportlab, 
> it's intended to be used as a page layout tool. I mean, (it seems) I 
> have to do pagination, table splitting and all of those tedious work. 

Platypus - part of Reportlab - does have this.

> Not that different from what I already have with pure simple html. I 
> think it's to much work switching from a flow display (html) to a 
> position based display (reportlab). I'm probably wrong on this, but 
> that's what I saw in the documentation.
> 
> May be you can point me to a simple report sample done with reportlab. 
> The samples I saw at reportlab's site are single page form oriented, not 
> multipage reports.

http://www.reportlab.org/devfaq.html#2.3.1

--
Greg

Eduardo Elgueta wrote:
> I think it's to much work switching from a flow display (html) to a 
> position based display (reportlab). I'm probably wrong on this, but 
> that's what I saw in the documentation.

The high level interface (Platypus) is actually not position based, but 
based on "Flowables".

-- Chris

There is also the apache FOP project, however its java based and may
not be what your after.

http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/

On 9/22/05, Christoph Zwerschke <cito@...> wrote:
> Eduardo Elgueta wrote:
> > I think it's to much work switching from a flow display (html) to a
> > position based display (reportlab). I'm probably wrong on this, but
> > that's what I saw in the documentation.
>
> The high level interface (Platypus) is actually not position based, but
> based on "Flowables".
>
> -- Chris
>
>
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Hi

I use ReportLab with WebWare and it is really great.

You may want to take a look at a sample 27 pages pdf report from 
        
http://www.adestiny.com/pdf/SampleReport.pdf
        
The report includes graphs, tables,  images manipulated using PIL, etc.
The actual reports are dynamically generated upon order.

If you are familiar with Latex (pdflatex) you can also use python as a
glue language to generate great pdf reports, as well as html. If you
ever need support for Asian fonts, Latex would probably be a better
solution.

P.C. Boey


On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 14:44 -0400, Eduardo Elgueta wrote:
> Tim,
> 
> Thank you for your feed-back.
> 
> I was looking for a report solution. From what I've seen of reportlab,
> it's intended to be used as a page layout tool. I mean, (it seems) I
> have to do pagination, table splitting and all of those tedious work.
> Not that different from what I already have with pure simple html. I
> think it's to much work switching from a flow display (html) to a
> position based display (reportlab). I'm probably wrong on this, but
> that's what I saw in the documentation.
> 
> May be you can point me to a simple report sample done with reportlab.
> The samples I saw at reportlab's site are single page form oriented,
> not multipage reports.
> 
> Ed.
>

Leith Parkin schrieb:
> There is also the apache FOP project, however its java based and may
> not be what your after.
> http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/

As an interesting side node, FOP has been Python based for a while:
http://wdvl.internet.com/Internet/Future/fop.html

For a comparison Reportlab/FOP, see:
http://two.pairlist.net/pipermail/reportlab-users/2002-August/000426.html

-- Christoph

Well after reading the many threads on this topic I am going to have to
take a look at reportlab.  But after playing around a bit with
datavision, for most database reports it is going to be my application
of choice.  It has a very nice drag and drop report generator, and I
can serve the reports to my clients as either html or pdf with minimal
coding.  the only drawback is that it is a java app and does not
integrate with webware, so I am running if off my tomcat server, but
with jython and a little hacking you can write java servlets in a
pretty pythonic way so I'm happy.  I am currently working migrating an
access report (I can hear the groans already) over to datavision so
that i can deliver it as pdf's to my clients.  If you've not solved
this problem to your satisfaction i would urge you to give datavision a
try.  I can share my servlets with you if it would help get you started,
but the jsp and the servlet examples are pretty straight forward and is
what I used to write my test code.
Jose

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: RE: [Webware-discuss] Printing from web application
> From: jose@...
> Date: Tue, September 20, 2005 4:14 pm
> To: Eduardo Elgueta <eelgueta@...>
> Cc: webware-discuss@...
>
> Pagination is always going to be a problem with webpages, so far
> browsers really don't make inserting page breaks an easy task.  If what
> you want is a Crystal Reports like product why not use datavision
> (http://sourceforge.net/projects/datavision) its free and works ok.
> Jose
>
> > -------- Original Message --------
> > Subject: [Webware-discuss] Printing from web application
> > From: Eduardo Elgueta <eelgueta@...>
> > Date: Tue, September 20, 2005 12:07 pm
> > To: webware-discuss@...
> >
> >       Hi All,
> >
> >  I have a small webware application in which I need to produce reports to be printed. Right now, html reports produce poor results (pagination is not constant).
> >
> >  I bigger companies, we use Crystal Reports, but this is a small non-for-profit organization, so we can't afford commercial software.
> >
> >  What are you guys using?
> >
> >  I was checking out reportlab, but it seems a lot of work, and I couldn't find tables support.
> >
> >  Best regards,
> >
> >  Ed.
> >
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> SF.Net email is sponsored by:
> Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download
> it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own
> Sony(tm)PSP.  Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php
> _______________________________________________
> Webware-discuss mailing list
> Webware-discuss@...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-discuss

hmm an underpowered pc, well that's an unfortunate new variable to add
to the discussion.  If it's really an underpowered server then you have
more problems on your hand then just getting something like tomcat
running.  I've run web servers on underpowered machines in the past and
its no fun so I feel for you.  As for getting this thread onto one of
the wiki's, that's an interesting thought.  I'll have to think about
how it could be done so that someone could get some use out of it
outside of the context of all the threads.  I wish you luck.  Let us
know how you finally do solve the issue
Jose

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [Webware-discuss] Printing from web application
> From: Eduardo Elgueta <eelgueta@...>
> Date: Tue, September 27, 2005 3:07 pm
> To: jose@...
> Cc: webware-discuss@...
>
>       Jos&eacute;,
>
>  I'm still working on this, but I don't think I can install tomcat in this old underpowered customer's PC.
>
>  Nevertheless, thank you very much for the tip. I think it'll be useful not only for me, but for anyone doing reporting in web apps.
>
>  BTW, I think it could be useful to copy this thread to the Wiki or other more persistant organized place. Any ideas?
>
>  Ed.
>
>  jose@... escribi&oacute;:  Well after reading the many threads on this topic I am going to have to
>  take a look at reportlab. But after playing around a bit with
>  datavision, for most database reports it is going to be my application
>  of choice. It has a very nice drag and drop report generator, and I
>  can serve the reports to my clients as either html or pdf with minimal
>  coding. the only drawback is that it is a java app and does not
>  integrate with webware, so I am running if off my tomcat server, but
>  with jython and a little hacking you can write java servlets in a
>  pretty pythonic way so I'm happy. I am currently working migrating an
>  access report (I can hear the groans already) over to datavision so
>  that i can deliver it as pdf's to my clients. If you've not solved
>  this problem to your satisfaction i would urge you to give datavision a
>  try. I can share my servlets with you if it would help get you started,
>  but the jsp and the servlet examples are pretty straight forward and is
>  what I used to write my test code.
>  Jose
>
>   -------- Original Message --------
>  Subject: RE: [Webware-discuss] Printing from web application
>  From: jose@...
>  Date: Tue, September 20, 2005 4:14 pm
>  To: Eduardo Elgueta <eelgueta@...>
>  Cc: webware-discuss@...
>
>  Pagination is always going to be a problem with webpages, so far
>  browsers really don't make inserting page breaks an easy task. If what
>  you want is a Crystal Reports like product why not use datavision
>  (http://sourceforge.net/projects/datavision) its free and works ok.
>  Jose
>
>   -------- Original Message --------
>  Subject: [Webware-discuss] Printing from web application
>  From: Eduardo Elgueta <eelgueta@...>
>  Date: Tue, September 20, 2005 12:07 pm
>  To: webware-discuss@...
>
>  Hi All,
>
>  I have a small webware application in which I need to produce reports to be printed. Right now, html reports produce poor results (pagination is not constant).
>
>  I bigger companies, we use Crystal Reports, but this is a small non-for-profit organization, so we can't afford commercial software.
>
>  What are you guys using?
>
>  I was checking out reportlab, but it seems a lot of work, and I couldn't find tables support.
>
>  Best regards,
>
>  Ed.
>
>
>
>  -------------------------------------------------------
>  SF.Net email is sponsored by:
>  Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download
>  it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own
>  Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php
>  _______________________________________________
>  Webware-discuss mailing list
>  Webware-discuss@...
>  https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/webware-discuss
>
>  --
>  Eduardo Elgueta
>  Senior Consultant
>  Navix
>
>  correo/email: eelgueta@...
>  tel&eacute;fono/phone: +56 (2) 381-1467
>  celular/mobile: +56 (9) 821-0033
>  web: http://www.navix.cl
>
>  Av. Once de Septiembre 1945 Of. 502
>  Providencia 750-0503
>  Santiago, Chile
>