changing report .xsl

[Robby Stephenson]

On Wednesday 25 October 2006 8:52, Merv Curley wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 October 2006 10:06, Mathias Monnerville wrote:
> > Don't you think it could be a great idea to implement some kind of
> > report manager for Tellico ? I think many people doesn't know what
> > what XSL(T) is and how to deal with it. Or maybe they don't want
> > to.
> >
> > Giving the user the ability to build simple reports within Tellico
> > could be a nice new  feature. Maybe implementing a wizard-like
> > dialog with a few simple steps would be great. Then the wizard
> > would generate XSL-T code on-the-fly which could be used by
> > Tellico...
>
> I haven't tried to print any special reports, but Robbies first answer
> in this thread didn't help me a lot. I don't know whee to find line
> 39 for starters.

Shelagh was looking at the Column View report, which is created from the 
Column_View.xsl file that gets installed with Tellico. So line 39 refers to 
that file.

> I know Reports are a tough thing to implement, the financial
> program 'Moneydance' has more requests for better reports than any
> other enhancement. But I certainly agree that if we have to be
> programmers to make specialized reports, then anything should be
> better than that.

A form designer has been on the back burner for a while. One thing I've been 
keeping in mind about using KexiDB for the SQL backend is that Kexi has its 
own form designer, which you could use to query the Tellico database.

There's a lot of code in a form designer and I've been reluctant to tackle 
it. And right now, I want to start focusing more on Tellico 2, etc., so 
there won't be any major new features until I get the SQL stuff figured 
out.

> So if Robby can get some help from other programmers maybe this would
> be doable. If he gets results by 'trial and error', where does that
> leave us, the ordinary non-geek?

XSL has a steep learning curve, very true. One of the reasons Tellico ships 
with 8 different reports was that I wanted to give a lot of examples to 
work with, in case anyone ever wanted to customize the reports. Those are 
the results of my trials, so to speak. :) I'm happy to answer any XSL 
questions on the list, too, and there are many tutorials and stuff online.

But yeah, it's complicated. 

Robby