Discuss: Free Report Viewer for Valentina Reports

Add-Ons
1

Hi Guys,

2- weeks ago we have add PRINTING to our Valentina Reports engine, which works on 3 OS, directly from Xojo Apps, and now we want discuss with you one more often asked feature – Report Viewer, which Xojo developers can point to own customers.

We have think about this, and decide that the most logical and right way – add this feature into our free Valentina Studio edition.

Up to know free Valentina Studio (not from MAS) was able to open Valentina Project (*vsp) file with reports, which you can check in Report Editor but not edit/modify. Also printing was a part of PRO version.

Right now our developers making some changes:

  • printing of report will be in the fre version of Valentina Studio

  • when you open a report in free version, you will see only PREVIEW mode, Report Editor will be hidden.
    In preview mode you can choose paper format, see generated reports, export it to different formats, send to printer.

       ** in free Valentina Studio you still will be able get demo of Report Editor if create a new Valentina Project.

You can see small video made by our developer from his dropbox. This video will be available some time…
https://xojo.io/ed1e07fbc227

Please let us know if you like this model overall, any other advices / feature requests?

2

Hi,

I think we have some customers (users) who we want to be able to view reports, but not access data at all, no queries etc.

Will this be possible?

3

Hi Russ,

let’s discuss.

  • Report Designer create report using usually some test db and test data.

  • then this report go to 10 customers, each have own db.
    So at least they must be able to specify which server/db to use.
    right?

  • Queries … queries may be can be hidden.

Actually we can try to add for .vsp file - some properties, which will define what customer see and can do. Just we need specify this features.

4

Hi Ruslan

Lets say i have 20 customers with the same database schema, I create a report for them and send it to them.
as you say, they will need to set a connection, but they will just want to see the report, not all the other things in studio,
because it will confuse them and generate lots of support calls to us.
maybe the connection is default for that computer ? set once and then it always tries to use that connection?

but then there are other users who will want to see queries and be able to connect to other databases perhaps.

maybe some configuration file that switches things on and off?

5

Connection yes can looks default of course.
e.g. relative path to .vsp file
or localhost to Valentina Report Server on the same machine.

In regard … see only reports … This will require additional efforts,
and can be implemented as that ‘Valentina Project property’

  • start vstudo only in Report preview mode. i.e. SQL Editor and other things - hidden.
6

New WIKI page about free Valentina Report Viewer as part of Valentina Studio

  • Here we describe how Report Viewer will work in the v6.4 (expected in nearest few days).

  • This should be considered as a new feature for Valentina Reports.

– This is first step in this direction.
– You are welcome image how your customers can use this in your products/solutions and provide any feature-requests.

Russ, in 1-2 days we will make 6.4b1 – so you will be able touch this feature, to see if it is okay, or we need really do something special to hide more things (connections, queries).

7

Hi Ruslan,

Does Valentina Report Viewer have a command line interface so you can silently request a report, pass in parameters and specify an output *.pdf file?

Is it possible to create reports based on an ODBC datasource or non-database sources such as XML?

8

Hi Steve,

  1. no command line parameters in VStudio (which is Report Viewer)
    We adding soon command line tool for VServer, then I guess you will be able do that.

You asking thinking about which task?

  1. Valentina Reports yes can connect to ODBC data source.
  • Directly from XML file not yet. On TODO.
9

[quote=253972:@Ruslan Zasukhin]1) no command line parameters in VStudio (which is Report Viewer)
We adding soon command line tool for VServer, then I guess you will be able do that. [/quote]I don’t think that helps. Let’s say I’ve written an accounting application and I’ve used VStudio to design the reports. I don’t use VServer, I have only purchased VStudio. Now I want to include the VStudio free report viewer so my users can view/print/export reports.

One of the tasks my application performs is emailing out statements of account, my users are not going to want to do this one at a time previewing each one and manually exporting it, they are going to want a routine that generates a *.pdf for each customer with an outstanding balance, attaches it to an email and sends it off only notifying them when the entire process is complete. In order for the free report viewer to be genuinely useful I need it to be able to accommodate this kind of usage because in my experience of writing business software this scenario is more common than a user opening a report to view it. Remittance advices being emailed out when a supplier payment run is done, invoices being emailed out when goods are dispatched, etc, etc… The user will not want to preview each individual report, that’s only practical for a very small enterprise.

There also needs to be a way of controlling the reports available on a user by user basis so it might be best if the controlling application could retrieve a report template file and pass that in as a command line parameter too.

If you made a x-platform console version of your report renderer that received the report template file, report parameters, and output file name as command line parameters then for me VStudio would be a very interesting product.

10
  1. Let me note, that you as Xojo developer can develop always own app around Valentina Reports,
    which will be the most useful for your task.

To use Valentina Studio and its Free Report Viewer in way as you dream, we will need make yet few steps forward, to allow use it as kind of IDE to develop and lock some features for end-user.

  1. You can of course to report this feature request – Add Command Line params to VStudio project,
    and suggest example of parameters to control report features…

Command line params open doors for bash/bat scripts. This is good of course.

11

[quote=254184:@Ruslan Zasukhin]Command line params open doors for bash/bat scripts. This is good of course.[/quote]I would imagine most programming languages can run a program and read what it writes to stdout. With a command line interface VReports could be used from any programming language not just those you have an ADK for.

12

Hi Steve,

we have implement command line parameters for Valentina Studio, and therefore for Report Viewer.
Will looks as

vstudio.exe
  -project "~/Documents/MyProject.vsp"
    -make_new_report "Report_1"
      -datasource "vserver://host=localhost ..."
      -query "SELECT * FROM t1"
      -print_to_disk "~/Documents/1.pdf"
        -format kToPdf
        -start_page 1
        -end_page 10

Will be available in nearest days in 6.4 betas or release.

13

[quote=254645:@Ruslan Zasukhin]Hi Steve,
we have implement command line parameters for Valentina Studio, and therefore for Report Viewer…[/quote]Excellent news :slight_smile:
Thanks, Ruslan

14

Valentina v6.4 is online.
Contains both Report Viewer and command line parameters

15

I’ve only had VStudio and VReports for around 48 hours (both included in the OmegaBundle) but so far I’m really impressed. VStudio is a pleasure to use and the VReports ADK makes it a breeze to add reports to a project. I was even able to use one of the included examples as the basis for a new report preview screen in one of my own projects which I had up and running within 90 minutes of receiving my license code. Previewing a report is as simple as opening a project file you’ve created with VStudio, selecting a report from within that project, setting any parameters and specifying a canvas for the preview to be drawn to. Outputting the report as a *.pdf file is equally as simple.

I’ll post back if I stumble across any gotchas but right now I’m very happy.

16

[quote=255460:@Steve Wilson]I’ve only had VStudio and VReports for around 48 hours (both included in the OmegaBundle) but so far I’m really impressed. VStudio is a pleasure to use and the VReports ADK makes it a breeze to add reports to a project. I was even able to use one of the included examples as the basis for a new report preview screen in one of my own projects which I had up and running within 90 minutes of receiving my license code. Previewing a report is as simple as opening a project file you’ve created with VStudio, selecting a report from within that project, setting any parameters and specifying a canvas for the preview to be drawn to. Outputting the report as a *.pdf file is equally as simple.

I’ll post back if I stumble across any gotchas but right now I’m very happy.[/quote]

Hi Steve - thanks for the great feedback and comments!

17

Great news Ruslan,

and now completely off the record: we have this Europe/Ukraine referendum in The Netherlands.

Should I vote pro or against it?

18

Hi Alexander,

Well, Ukraine IMO should join Europe Union if possible.

Otherwise Russia again will join us back to self and use our resources against the rest of world.
Russia did, do and will fight for Ukraine.

19

There’s a post as well on how to set custom report page sizes on our forum now, for those of you interested in printing your reports with Reports Viewer.

20

@Lynn Fredricks - Circular link in your post.