ANN: PollyReports 1.5 -- Band-oriented PDF Report Generator

C

Chris Gonnerman

I've held off announcing this until I was sure it was really stable;
it's been 19 days since I made the last change to it, so here goes.
PollyReports is my Python module for report generation. It is designed
to be, quite literally, the "simplest thing that can possibly work" in
the field of PDF generation from a database record set. There is a
somewhat vague resemblance to GeraldoReports; I had problems with
Geraldo's pagination which led me to develop PollyReports in a brief
flurry of intense activity.

It's on PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/PollyReports
and on Github: https://github.com/Solomoriah/PollyReports
and I have a blog where I talk about it (like anyone cares):
http://opensource.gonnerman.org/?cat=4

Here's the README:

PollyReports.py
Copyright (c) 2012 Chris Gonnerman
All Rights Reserved
See the LICENSE file for more information. (Note: BSD licensed)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PollyReports.py provides a set of classes for database report writing.
It assumes that you are using Reportlab to do PDF generation, but can
work with any "canvas-like" object as desired.

PollyReports provides the following framework for report generation:

A Report object has a data source bound to it at instantiation. One or
more Band objects (at least, a detail Band) must be added to it, and
then the generate() method will be called to process the data source.
The data source
must be an iterator that produces objects that can be accessed via []
operations, meaning mainly dict, list, and tuple types, i.e. the most
common types of records returned by standard database modules. The
detail band is
generated() once for each row.

Band objects contain a list of Elements (generally at least one) which
define how data from the row should be printed. An Element may print
any normal data item or label and may be subclassed to handle other
things like images. Generating a band in turn calls Element.generate()
for each element, producing a list of Renderers with the first item in
the list being the overall height of the band. The height is used to
decide if the band will fit on the current page; if not, a new page will
be created first. When the page is finally ready for the band,
Renderer.render() will be called for each Renderer in the element list
in order to actually render the data.

As noted above, PollyReports expects a Reportlab-like canvas interface.
The module has been kept as clean as possible, so that, though I don't
actually recommend it, it would not be insane to say

from PollyReports import *

Importing only what you expect to use is still a better idea, of course.
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
473,769
Messages
2,569,580
Members
45,054
Latest member
TrimKetoBoost

Latest Threads

Top