Best report writing tool for JADE?

[AndrewHC]

I need to create a HTML report builder for a competition system in JADE.

Competitors compete in events

Judges give competitors scores in their event

The reports I need to produce show the scores given to each band by all judges. An example layout has been included below.


The issue I'm having is that the number of Judges in an event varies, so the report builder would need to be able to set the number of columns to the number of judges in the event.

I am not sure on the best route to take. I would really appreciate some guidance here. The options I see are:

• JadeReportWriter schema - I've started reading the documentation for this, and it seems promising. Especially that JadeReportWriter supports transient classes. I could create transient classes to hold the list of scores given to a competitor, and display the transient class for each row. The issues I see with this is that it seems relatively hard to use, and I'm not sure if it supports changing the number of columns being displayed based on the data
  
  A JADE Painter print form (I'm not sure on the correct name for this) - This would require I either make twenty reports (There could be 1 to 20 Judges at an event), or learn how to create Label controls at runtime in JADE; I am not sure if this is possible. I'm also not sure how I would handle more Judges than could fit on a single page (My experience with the JADE painter suggests I simply wouldn't be able to create a report with more columns that sensible on a single page (4-8), or use a small font to fit all the columns on).
  
  Creating my own JADE HTML-producing reporting system - This would add a large amount of development time, and would likely produce low-quality reports.

If anyone can advise me on the best solution to create a report which shows a varying number of columns, I would greatly appreciate it.

[allistar]

A JADE Painter print form (I'm not sure on the correct name for this) - This would require I either make twenty reports (There could be 1 to 20 Judges at an event), or learn how to create Label controls at runtime in JADE; I am not sure if this is possible. I'm also not sure how I would handle more Judges than could fit on a single page (My experience with the JADE painter suggests I simply wouldn't be able to create a report with more columns that sensible on a single page (4-8), or use a small font to fit all the columns on).

This is possible - it's pretty straight forward to create a control at runtime. Something like this (off the top of my head):

create label transient;
label.parent := form;
label.top := 20;
label.left := 30;
label.height := 20;
label.width := 100;
label.caption := "Hello";
form.addControl(label);

You'd probably want some nice framework method to add the controls to the form at runtime.

If you know that there cannot be more than 20 judges, you could always create a report with that many in it and set all columns to be invisible, only making them visible when you need that column. There's no need to create 20 different reports in this case.

[AndrewHC]

Hi allistar, I'm a while away from testing the reporting side of this system yet, but the instructions on how to dynamically create an object is awesome, thank-you! It should open the possibilities for the GUI of the system.

[torrie]

Another option would be to use a table control in the reports, you could then set the number of columns to equal the number of judges. You may find that due to paging etc, it might be better to setup the table in a frame with only one row, you can then print each row separately. You can format the table to have grid lines etc as required.