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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Flakey Reports
From:       Jaroslaw Staniek <js () iidea ! pl>
Date:       2008-04-27 22:52:34
Message-ID: 481503B2.2060504 () iidea ! pl
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Thomas Zander said the following, On 2008-04-27 22:31:

> Cool!  Good to hear :)
> I had a long talk on #koffice this morning with dipesh which gave us both a 
> lot of insights into what flake can provide and kexi wants to have.
> Very productive session IMO :)
> 
> Note also that this thread was limited to *just* the reports. Some statements 
> were read otherwise and caused confusion.  Nobody suggested to have flake 
> plugin shapes in the forms.
> The distinction is subtle but important.  You can use *specific* flake shapes 
> (like the text and chart shape) via their interfaces.  The next step is to 
> allow *any* type of flake-plugin to be used (like the music shape, or a 
> currently unknown shape-type).  This second step is probably not useful for 
> the Forms at all.
> Its like trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. I don't think its a good 
> idea.
> 
>> But 
>> this has rather nothing to do with infrastructure controling the data flow
>> and data processing. Sebastian explained this again regarding "kexi is not
>> document/file-driven app" (neither is any app/lib based on kexidb
>> approach).
> 
> I agree,  as said above.
> Do note that each flake-plugin can generate or load a stand-alone ODF app, so 
> it still is possible to integrate stuff in the forms editor, but it will not 
> be as much data-driven as kexi does now with other elements.
> 
>> For me, you're trying to put too much things to do in a single library:
>> "Flake, technology that binds the KOffice apps together, after all" is in
>> other words a claim it can be a silver bullet, while it is simply not true.
> 
> I would suggest to not read more in my words then I write, its an excellent 
> source of confusion and subsequent frustration. ;)
> When I said that flake binds the KOffice apps together I meant that as an 
> observation, the different applications in 2.0 start to have a very 
> consistent user interface.  Does that mean its a silver-bullet, Hell no! As 
> can be plainly seen by an application like Kexi or partially even KPlato that 
> doesn't have a canvas and not fitting in as much as they could.
> 
>> Note I still cannot see reson why KWord shouldnt perform rendering of
>> full-page reports based on ODF templates. There is no need to duplicate
>> this functionality in Kexi.
> 
> Again agreed.
> This, incidentally, is a big reason for this thread :) Adam was researching 
> exactly this point.  So lets stick to that!
> 
>> What I "dismiss" is a proposal of implementing data interfaces again
>> (that's implicit result of the proposals[] ). 
> 
> Its only implicit if you assume that flake should be used in forms and 
> subsequent database-driven user interfaces. Isn't it?
> If you limit using Flake plugins in Kexi to;
> a) reports and other 'read-only' situations & 
> b) using specific flake-shapes (think kchart) via their existing interface you 
> will not require anyone to create any data-interfaces.
> 
> Now; to come back to my red-line though this thread;
> please keep investigating how flake can be used in kexi.  I am sure there are 
> lots of cool usecases (probably more outside forms) that make sense.  

Read-only reperesentation of data in forms is very much the same what in 
practice is known as "reports". So there's no need to separate both words 
artificially in this regard. Taking your example, displaying music shape in a 
record, within a form _is_ perfectly valid use case. No need to limit the case 
to print-previewing and printing only. This is also a reason why we kept the 
original reports implementation untouched for a long time - just because forms 
and reports have so much in common regarding displaying chunks of data in a 
specialized way, like chart/plot/music/any-graphics shapes.

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
  Sponsored by OpenOffice Polska (http://www.openoffice.com.pl/en) to work on
  Kexi & KOffice (http://www.kexi.pl/en, http://www.koffice.org/kexi)
  KDE Libraries for MS Windows (http://windows.kde.org)
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