Re: Printing XML + XSLT (2nd try)

[Francis Norton <francis@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kay Michael wrote:
> 
...
> 
> I'd be inclined to use XSLT to massage the data into a format that a
> report-writing package will accept, and then use the report-writer to create
> the HTML. Unfortunately there are lots of things that report writers have
> done for 30 years that XSLT can't do yet, and printing running totals at the
> bottom of each page is one of them. I'm not an expert on XSL Formatting
> Objects, but I don't see any evidence that that spec is tackling the problem
> either. XSL comes from the document handling tradition and not the data
> processing tradition.
> 
I spent several years writing this kind of report program manually in
4GLs (anyone here remember dBase II?). In case anyone is thinking of
trying this, here is what I learned.

A lot depends on your requirement. A program to do simple running totals
can be written very simply, but in a way that is totally incompatible
with future scope expansions.

I ended up working on a requirements model which permitted n-level
grouping of the data, where each group may have different row-lengths
for its "header", "carried-forward", "brought-forward" and "footer"
details. This proved to be a really nice scope, chewy but do-able, and
satisfying 98.35% of the customer requirements I came across. (The
exception being where the customer wanted sub-groups repeated
horizontally rather than vertically.)

I don't want to waste bandwidth on a potentially off-topic matter, so
I'll leave it here unless anyone is actually interested in how to
implement this class of reports!

Cheers -

Francis.


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