Report Designer For BKS Shorts (Shorts Designer)

I am about ready to go to beta with my add on for the BKeeney Shorts Reporting add on. While I work on documentation I thought I’d throw a sample app up for anyone who wishes to try it out. My goal is to get some testers to test this sample app focusing on the result rather than the code. At the end of the beta testing I will open source the code for anyone brave enough to try and make sense of it :wink:

There is no documentation included at this point but several demo reports/databases and one 2 page Before you start pdf.

OSX Version
Win 32 Version
Demo Files

Design Mode

Preview Mode

Also for Windows Peter ?

Yes. There is a windows link above.

A short 2-1/2 minute video on how you integrate Shorts Designer into your own apps.

Video

This looks like a very nice addition to BK Shorts! Great Job!
Tim

Hi Peter,
is the integration with apps not yet available or I’m missing something?

Thanks

Luciano

P.S.
Using the designer can not display the menu to add the band elements (rectangle, image, etc.).
I tried everything ctrl + left click, ctrl + right click, only right or left click and so on but 98% is displayed the menu to handle the object (move forward, etc.).
On the band there is not selected items.

The links are to a demo app. When I release the components you will be able to integrate into your own projects.

Right now you add images and rects by right clicking in any empty space within a band. You should get a contextual menu

I will most likely add those options in the table/view sidebar above the table section to make it easier.

Peter, (just like in Windows) there is a way to make a screen shot of the “front window”:

use cmd-shift-4,
press the space bar,
move the Mouse above the UI element you want to copy to disk and click.

You will find the screen shot in the Document folder (and so no need to try to remove surrounding stuff…

HTH

Peter, will this also work on Web?

The report designer is desktop only at this point. Even with the new web drag and drop I don’t think we’ll be able to accomplish what we need.

Since Shorts itself can work in web apps the report generation from the JSON definition string should work. We’ll have to create a new web project to test that and that might be a while.

Thanks Bob.

There are really two ways I see people using the designer.

  1. Provide full report capability within your client’s application. *You can limit the schema the end user has access to for reporting down to the field level.

  2. Provide hooks for the user to run reports you provide for them. It would not be difficult to have opening the report file present a dialog for setting criteria such as a date range, etc. All interaction with the database uses prepared statements so this would be a safe approach. (This may be built in at release)

Web could be handled with an external (desktop) editor to create the reports launched by the web app.