Report architecture changes coming

[Robert Graham Merkel]

I notice you've sent in quite a few report patches lately, which
have been very useful.

However, you should be aware that sometime soon the reporting
architecture is likely to get changed.  I'm writing a proposal 
with my ideas on how it should be done.  (I know I've been promising for a
while, but it really *is* happening (it's about 50% written-up) 
and in the meantime I've been busy
playing around with charts).  Additionally, there will be a concerted
effort to make *all* reports use the query API for getting information
out of the engine, replacing the current ad-hockery.

Instead of using ad-hoc methods to create HTML, and the transaction
report's html-generation code (which is a little inflexible and has
performance problems on very large datasets), the proposal will
hopefully make the reports considerably more consistent in appearance,
as well as having that appearance easily customizable.

I know I'd personally like as much input and help with this process
as I can get, so comments on the proposal will be much appreciated.

The downside of this, of course, is that this process will mean that
the existing reports will have to be rewritten - some more than
others, and the reports that you're patching will be part of that
process.

On the other hand, the nice part of this, is that you (and anyone else
out there lurking on the ML, for that matter) can be involved, if you
want, in the design and implementation of the HTML generation code,
and redesign the reports from the ground up with the kind of features 
you want.

Thanks again for your interest and your contributions.

------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

------------------------------------------------------------