Designer for BKeeney Shorts reporting tool

I’ve been working on a front end (designer) for BKeeney Shorts. Basically it is my old report designer reworked to provide a JSON exchange with Bob’s “Shorts” tool backend. It is in late alpha and I’m looking for comments/suggestions. At this point it is a banded report designer although no reason it can’t be expanded further.

Video Overview

Peter, that is very, very cool. It really shows off how fast Shorts renders a document.

Very cool Peter!

Date of release ?

No release date. It is a side project that works fine for my needs that I was hoping for some suggestions/feedback on to determine if continued development is warranted.

Very Cool!

First and foremost … one of the more promising developments in the area of XOJO report generation that I’ve seen in a long time. Secondly, it is really encouraging to see the “piggy back” off of all of Bob’s work with Shorts. You’ve carried it to the next level … kinda like an “indirect collaboration” which takes an already powerful tool and makes it user-friendly and application-ready … which is the direction the XOJO Community would just love to see report generation capability go … and the sooner the better.

Do you envision your efforts possibly including the Windows platform? I’d take it in a heartbeat … “garish pink” and all! ^^

Like I said, Peter … really encouraging to many of us out here to see your efforts … BRAVO!!!

@Don Lyttle This is Xojo. Windows is kinda part of the deal :slight_smile:

A few new enhancements.
Relations can be set up for databases not using foreign keys
Connection info (except password) is saved with report.
Queries are now using prepared statements.
Foreign key support overhauled

Output Enhancements

Peter I like the app and would be willing to pay for it. It would help me shorten my learning curve on Shorts.

@Peter Fargo can I give you some advice about the videos? you might want to lower your resolution when doing the videos. Watching the videos full screen on my laptop, it was hard to see some of the details you were pointing out. Otherwise the videos were awesome.

thank
sb

@scott boss ? on the videos. Lazy recording technique - I don’t often do it.

We all have done it before. Someone pointed it out to me years back that I did the same thing.

@Peter Fargo the app looks awesome so far. If you want a beta tester or such, let me know.

A couple of additions. No audio - reconstruction going on !
Preview 3

[quote=205838:@Peter Fargo]A couple of additions. No audio - reconstruction going on !
Preview 3[/quote]

Great video. Looks like a good app.

Enhanced Design canvas and Retina support.

Preview 4

looking very nice!

Conditional Formatting

I should be ready soon for a few testers to work out the bigger kinks.

[quote=209248:@Peter Fargo]Conditional Formatting

I should be ready soon for a few testers to work out the bigger kinks.[/quote]
Will there be a way to use styled text (rtf) fields in the designer?
It’s the one thing we really do need at our company, and that seems to be missing in most solutions.
As far as I know Shorts is supposed to support printing RTF fields.
I’m testing new printing solutions for our company this week. Wouldn’t mind testing this as well if if supports Richt text fields.

Shorts does support RTF fields with some caveats. The RTF Text blocks are fixed height. We currently have no way to determine text height. And just like with FTC, the RTF support isn’t 100% (the RTF spec is huge!).

I have not seen RTF text blocks in the Shorts Designer yet.