Shorts Designer
Shorts Designer is a tool I developed for my personal use. I am open sourcing the code as a thank you to the RB, RS, Xojo community which I have enjoyed being a member of for the last 15 years. The Designer component requires BKeeney Software’s Shorts reporting tool. This is a commercial product which I chose to use due to it’s flexibility and support. Designer is intended to be a simple banded reporting tool. It is not a universal, do everything under the sun, reporting tool. Shorts, on the other hand, can do just about anything if you take the time to learn it’s usage. I felt the ease of a GUI for simple reporting coupled with the power of being able to manually create, through code, any difficult reports was a natural fit.
What it is
- Simple Banded Report Designer
- Header, Grand Summary leading, multiple breaks leading, body, multiple breaks trailing, grand summary trailing and footer bands.
- Connects to SQLite, CubeSQL, ODBC, PostgreSQL and MySQL (at this time)
- Band level conditional formatting using XojoScript and contextual commands
- Temporary views (temp tables for MySQL) can be created and saved as part of the report
- Saved report files are simple JSON which can be used with BKeeney Shorts or your own system
- If foreign keys are used all relationship paths are built automatically. If not you can add them and they will be saved within the report file.
- SQL generated automatically and queries use prepared statements.
What it is not
- An advanced designer
- Supported - Although development is ongoing and I am very interested in all feedback there is no official support implied. BKeeney software is planning on releasing a supported version of the code for users of BKeeney Shorts.
Acknowledgments…
- BKeeney Software for Shorts which inspired this project
- Oliver Osswald for his imSplitter control
- All the snippets, used throughout, from the RB/RS/Xojo forums
Notes:
- Untested in Linux
- You can use the BKS Shorts Demo to try the designer in Xojo’s Debug environment. You just won’t be able to view reports if compiled without a license.
Documentation included in the repository.
