Re: Printing large DB reports

FROM : Aaron Burghardt
DATE : Wed Apr 20 15:23:37 2005

On Apr 19, 2005, at 9:02 PM, Scott Stevenson wrote:

>
> On Apr 19, 2005, at 5:41 PM, Aaron Burghardt wrote:
>
>

>> I am generating reports from a database and could have millions of 
>> records to print in a given report. The documented Cocoa approach 
>> for printing would be to draw into a custom view and to paginate 
>> the view accordingly (either automatically or a custom pagination 
>> scheme). This leads me to two problems/questions:
>>

>
> I expect you're going to need a batch strategy of some sort when 
> dealing with such an immense number of records.
>
> As for the layout side, consider generating an HTML or XML document 
> with CSS formatting. This allows you to offload all the hard work 
> to WebView.
>


Hi Scott,

Thanks for the suggestions.

Our requirements are to generate reports that are viewable on screen, 
printable, and can be saved. We briefly considered XML/XSLT, but it 
appeared we would have to break up the output into many documents to 
avoid unmanageably large files (if I understand the the spec 
correctly), which would be cumbersome for the user to print.  A 
single PDF is preferable to our client. Also, the report needs to be 
viewable on a variety of platforms and we wanted to avoid dealing 
with the differences in web browsers. Maybe we dismissed the idea too 
quickly.

Cheers,

Aaron