I am thinking of using Inkscape as an advanced reporting tool... Something to replace the JasperReports/iReports crystal reports, and the like. Basically I hope to use inkscape to help generate the view while I use web2py (a web framework) to access the controller and pass context the view that is created with the svg data. The idea to me is that I use tags in text boxes that I wanted dynamic data. Like the file attached. If I need to do more advanced things like looping, then I would need to get right into the svg code and make the magic happen there. This is were my questions start to arise.
If the file (test.svg) attached there are tags like this "{{" and "}}" these are used as part of web2py. It would be really cool if I could do things like looping. For example I created a loop in the attached "test_with_loop" file and even edited it with inkscape and saved again, and it still seems to work! But if I were to go more advanced than this, what challenges do you see ahead? Could a UI to handle this be created somehow? I hope to see if I can't work around them and perhaps even make a plugin for inkscape that could work around this. I am making a proposal to do this very thing right now for a very large company that needs features just like this.
I hope to approach the customer with inkscape as the solution, and the code we create as a plugin would be open source and my contribution to this great application.
Other things that could be a problem are:
Multiple pages, we are on the verge of getting that started with svg 1.2, but without it, I could still create logic with multiple single svg files that handle multiple pages very with a bit of programming. But if you have any ideas on how to solve this too I would be interested. Looping to other pages. Similar to the previous, if we have a list of data say in a table, would be be feasable to create a table in svg that could extend the page into other pages, like another template file and then properly end it with the continued content? Other things also need to be considered, like if you have a text box and there is too much text, how would that be handled, would it push the text down more, or simply cut it off. In html terms this would be the difference betten overflow:hidden; and overflow:auto; Any ideas on if this could be solved?
As a final question I want to simply ask if you know of any reporting tools that could actual do this besides the ones above that I have mentioned, and is it feasible to use inkscape as a reporting tool? If it was single pages, I could say yes right now, for as far as I know. But there could be something I am missing.
Best Regards, Jason Brower
