The ORM Foundation

Hi again,

What about allowing different output formats for reporting, such as PDF or DOC? Can we expect to see anything like this?

On the other hand, what would be the cost for implementing such features, assuming we have APIs for working with these file formats?

Thanks,

Ricardo Peres

The verbalization/reporting engine is based on text snippets (essentially pieces of text with replacement fields for other pieces of text), and I'd recommend maintaining this approach to allow users to customize any of the snippets and to easily leverage existing verbalization. We don't currently do any graphical report generation. The lowest cost approach for other file formats is to get a text file (XML is most readable) with enough information for converting into the file format you need. The minimal cost for providing alternate verbalizations of the core snippets in an XML file is a few lines of code (<100), a few lines in the registry, and an XML file. Obviously, it gets a little more complicated as you add your own snippets, file management, etc.

-Matt

BTW, AO5880 does not specify whether DOC or DOCX is wanted. I'm also not in a position to provide a detailed public costing of any of these features without knowing the company that you're preparing a bid for. This part of the discussion can be taken off line.

Personally, I create reports by copying the grapic to JPEG and copying the verbalization to Word. I provide these as a pair. I like the color of the verbalization, but generally sort the text (by paragraph) for easy reference.

It would be spiffy if Visual Studio let you print the graphics.

Probably the best way to re-format the output is to use a print driver. This will definitely work for PDF, but I don't know of any for Word (or RTF).