phpreports / News: Recent posts

Hey!
A guy warned me about a Sablotron/WindowsXP stuff, but I read his email late on webmail and on the other day I didn't find it when retrieving my emails to my pop3 mail client. I don't remember who was!
If you're reading this, please send me the email again. :-)

Hey! I just registered today the #phpreports channel on freenode.
I'm always there from Monday-Friday, 08:00 to 18:00 Brazilian time. :-)

I'm glad to tell you I finished the current version yesterday!!! Right now I have COL elements with everything you want inside of it, bookmarks, a XML file with the report inside of it, two output plugins (will make more two) bla bla bla. I'll write more two plugins this week and will release an alpha version later this week. Need to test it with the current reports I have here. :-)

Hey, I know that the things are going slow but at least they are going safe ... ;-)
Its already done the COL e GROUP elements with the new approach, now I just need to finish the PAGE element and the interaction between GROUPs and PAGEs. Its not a big deal. The new stuff like BOOKMARKs will be done quickly, and I'll make the output plugins very fast too. Just to give an ideia, I'll put the default plugin (the HTML render as it is done today), another one three-framed with bookmarks at left, toolbar at top and the report on the main frame at right, and another one to export as text files (this kind of thing will be acessible on the toolbar also).
Just give some more time. ;-)
[]'s

Hello !!! I'm still rewriting the 0.2.0 code (its becoming very "cleaner" than the original) but next week will be my vacation week (May 12 to May 18) so it will delay a little more than expected ... I'll make a little travel to the beach and I dont have a notebook. ;-)

Hey, I'm freezing the code on the 0.1.5 and will rewrite it with a lot of features/enhancements. It will be the 0.2.0 version. If you guys have some suggestions, the time is now!

Guys!!! Need your opinion here ... I always get email asking me about new output formats, and not only HTML. For example, PDF.
I still have the same opinion about the main engine: we need to keep it simple (I'm trying to make some more code cleaning and more documentation), so I dont think a good idea put a lot of options for other formats there, and I'd like to make plugins to transform the HTML file into another format.
BUT, as I was thinking on my lunch time (sushis really make my brain works eheheh), we could use the way phpreports is nowadays, changing its output to XML. Yes, another XML! You have your report detailed on a XML file, run phpreports and it gives you another XML file, with the full report there.
Then we can use this second XML file to output to HTML (don't worry!!! it will works like is working today, you wont find changes the way you're generating your reports) OR to another other some format we want!
To do that, all that we need is making another XSLT formatter to transform the second XML file into the format we want! I could write the HTML and a simple TXT XSLT file as example, and you could develop another XSLT files to what you want to transform the XML result report file.
What do you think about??? Need some opinions here.
Im trying to release the new version (0.1.5) today, but I have some ISP problems here and probabily will release it at home, at night (14:21 right now here), but I'm already think on that changes to the 0.1.6.
See ya

Hey, I'm thinking here ... I want to put every kind of contents inside the COL element on the FIELDS element ... with this we can put expressions, HTML code of the query result values there (nowadays we can just put the query result value), but this will make us change *all* the XML layout files, inserting a TYPE="FIELD" on the query result COL elements.
It's not too hard if you have a few XML layout files, but will give more work if you have a lot. I'm working on a migration program where you could put your old XML files and it will give you the new ones with the TYPE="FIELD".
Do you guys think its a good idea??? No problems reviewing *all* your XML layout files??? Will be a very cool feature to do, and its the beggining of multiline support on the FIELDS too ...
Tell me what you think!!! :-D

A guy asked me about a PostgreSQL interface (yes, there is the ado, I know eheh) and I developed it quickly and emailed the file to him for testing, but till today no one answer about it. I need some PostgresSQL user to test it with phpreports to make sure I can release it safely on the next version.

There was a bug on the 0.1.3 version - on the PHPRepoFieldURL.php file there was two constructors (really dont know what happened, need to verify the code at home, I'm not using CVS - yet - and I'm on my work now). Thanks to Marcelo Escallon that saw that.
On all my tests here it was working ok, maybe for you could be working too, but in any case just download the new version. Sorry for that.

Working now on the possibilty to make HTML FORM elements with the REPORT and PAGE objects. The ideia will make all your report, or each report page, into forms you can submit with their data.
I'm thinking in a way to refer to the form fields - the current idea is having static and dynamic fields, all of them like <input type="hidden">, with the current col value as its value and their name, if dynamic, changing on a static count (for ex. name="id" will be id1, id2, id3 and so on) or if static, the name specified on the tag.
This could make really some cool reports with user input, used for example, on a virtual store (list all the products from the database with input blank text fields and process all the filled values after the submit).
Will work more on this next Saturday (at home).

Now phpreports can include XHTML elements inside the COL element - so you can put in your XML report layout file code pasted from your preferred HTML editor.