As usual, good for you, Rich. Saw your demo last year at Whilfest and was immediately impressed by your report engine.

The only item in my wish list is: add buttons to the viewer that save the report in editable form in Word, RTF, and XLS formats. I am sure you can do it, Rich. Please do. At least in RTF.

Alex


>I posted a screen shot of the Mind's Eye Report Engine while previewing a Report page in the soon to be posted BETA 4. This screen shot has a formatted MS Word text at the top, 2 MS Visio detailed floor plan drawings in the middle and a MS Publisher page on the bottom left and an MS Excel Chart on the lower right corner. All of these drawings were added into MERE by first going into the respective applications and selecting the objects and then COPYING them to the Clipboard. Then I went back to a blank report page and then drew a bounding box to drop the objects onto the page.
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>All of this came about while at Whilfest Tuesday morning, when John St. Andria told me that one of his developers asked about having to recreate their charts that are in Excel in MERE. So, from that question I thought I might be able to easily add in Clipboard support for MERE. After about a 5 minute test in a new Delphi app in which I had an Excel Chart drawn on a Bitmap object, it was clear that this wouldn't be too hard to implement.
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>All of the objects in the screen shot example came across as a CF_METAFILEPICT format as well as CF_BITMAP. However, I chose to persist the Metafile drawings in the report engine since they are fully scaleable GDI drawing command scripts. The results I thought were very cool. Dragan got to see the results Tuesday night during the Linux Installfest. Then Wednesday morning Dragan dropped by the vendor area to show me a picture he took on his way to his hotel room time stamped at 12:59AM. It showed John St. Andria, Bo Durbin and myself all coding away on the 2nd floor area. I was busy adding in new code to test even more cool stuff. The new method I was working on is called SaveToMetafile(). This method will take and save the current report page to an Enhanced Metafile drawing which can now be dropped right into Word or Excel. I also added in a method called AddFromClipboard() which allows you to programmatically add clipboard objects to Report Pages by simply passing the Top, Left, Width
> and Height. So you could use OLE Automation to open a Word Doc or an Excel Chart and then generate the image of the document onto the Clipboard and then paste it into a report.
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>This also got me thinking about adding in a couple of new buttons to allow for the End User to add a New Page and Delete a Page from a report. Of course I will have to add a property to protect report pages so they don't delete those pages rendered by the Report Engine from a VFP report. As well as adding in properties to disable the New Page and Delete Page buttons. This opens up new possibilities of adding in Charts, Drawings and Word documents and blending them into a single Report Preview, Printed Document and even sending them all together in a single PDF document very easily. You can even browse to a Web Page and right click over an Image on the page and select COPY and then go to the Report Engine and drag a bounding box to drop the picture into the Report.
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>Currently, the next released BETA is drawing the Clipboard images as metafiles which are fully scaleable. However, when I save them to a PDF document I am converting them into 100% quality JPEG images. Eventually, I will be writing a METAFILE to PDF Engine which will convert the Metafile drawings directly into PDF drawing commands which should save on space as well as make them fully scaleable in Adobe reader as well.
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>I am still thinking through the property names to protect pages and to enable editing of report pages at the moment. But I plan to make this as easy to use as possible so you can combine multiple documents into a single report. If you have any ideas or suggestions along these lines please let me know.
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>For more information and to see the screen shot visit: http://www.mindseyeinc.com/ReportEngine