[Lazarus] FLC-PDF and LazReport

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 13 Apr 2016, Michael W. Vogel wrote:

> Am 08.04.2016 um 23:40 schrieb Graeme Geldenhuys:
>> 
>> I've written a PDF export filter, using fcl-pdf, for the fpReport (Free
>> Pascal Reporting) project that will be released some time this year.
>> fpReport still needs to bake a bit longer. ;-)  There are more features
>> coming in fpPDF too.
>> 
>> Regards,
>>    - Graeme -
> Very interesting!
>
> Could you say something about fpReport? Is it a choice for LazReport or what 
> is it for? Does it becomes part of FPC?

It becomes part of FPC. It is a banded reporting engine that does not depend
on any GUI widgetset. It needs to be usable in a headless webserver.

The feature set is roughly the one of Lazreport, but of course other enhancements
are planned. 
The fact that it is unit tested should already be an enhancement by itself :)

It will use a JSON file as input (or you can build it in code entirely), 
and will create various kinds of output, where initially we will make a 
PDF output engine.

We have already succesfully created test PDFs based on the engine, but we are
waiting to commit this to FPC till the first production reports are ready.

Currently there is no GUI designer yet, but this is planned; I think that
creating a designer should not be a big problem given the RTTI controls that
exist in Lazarus.

Michael.