[Laszlo-dev] Printing...

[Chris Lyman]

Hi All,

I need your help in a reality check regarding printing.  What I'm
currently looking at is JasperReports, or some derivation there of.  As
I see it, the flow would be something like this:

1)  The designer/developer creates the template for the printed page
using one of the various banded report creation software products (a few
of which run in Eclipse).  The output is XML and I'm guessing that it
would be possible to insert certain meta tags that would be filled in by
the Laszlo client runtime. i.e. <![CDATA[LPSBoogie:UserName]]>

2)  The user requests an app that will utilize the printing feature.
The user does his or her thing with the app.  Once the app is ready, it
will request the raw report file.  The app will then parse the xml file
and look for the special meta tags.  It may be easier to do this without
actually creating the XML object, just work over the string. The app
then passes back the modified report to the server.

-or-

After the app has done its thing, it passes back the user fields to the
server via a JSP page.  Then the JSP either creates a datasource for
JasperReports or modifies a copy of the report.

3)  The server then does its magic and creates a well formatted file,
which can then be downloaded by the client or the user.

Two immediate issues I see are the preclusion of the ability to generate
free form printed reports on the fly.  This may or may not be an issue,
I don't know if people really want to free form printed pages.  Anybody
have any input?

The other issue is dealing with the return product.  The resultant
report would be PDF (PostScript), HTML, XLS, CSV or XML.  Meaning that
either the browser would be used to deal with the file OR some sort of
page parser would have to be built into the Flash runtime.

Let me know what you think.  Is this even the direction that we want to
go?  Or do we want to do everything client side?
 
Best Regards,
Chris