Subject: Re: Printing XML + XSLT (2nd try) From: Francis Norton <francis@xxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 14:06:49 +0000 |
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. XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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