Add a serious report printing tool to CVI!

[RobertoBozzolo]

At present CVI is missing a serious report printing facility that permits to create flexible, professional and good looking reports.

A quick search in CVI forum shows that periodically somebody posts questions about reporting but available instruments at the moment are not satisfactory in my experience.

As far as I can tell, a good reporting instrument:

1. Should integrate easily with CVI
2. Should be fully documented, with some example for the more typical types of reports (text + table, text + graph, text + image...)
3. Should not rely on external programs (some customers have rigid constraints on the software installed on equipment machines; additionally, asking them to have full Word or Excel or Diadem installed only for reporting is just not serious)
4. Should not rely on ActiveX controls to be licensed separately (same as above)
5. Should permit to include text and graphics (images, graphs...) and define headers, footers, page numbering and other common features normally present in reports
6. Should output data directly to the printer or in PDF format
7. Should have a preview facility both for development and for the user (something that NIReports hasn't and will never have)

[Ian.W]

This remains an important and valuable feature that should be added.

As time marches forward those old DDE (and even ActiveX) means to cobble together reports in Word seem like they will one day be deprecated in a Windows or Office release, and a real solution as Roberto suggests will be come essential.

[Siddown]

Report generation has long been the feature most obviously lacking in CVI, the hooks to Word and Excel never really cut the mustard anyhow, and I have been known to install a database purely to take advantage of the specialist report generators available.

I do however realise that a full report suite would be beyond NI's dwindling commitment to its little CVI backwater but imagine there must be some mature suites out there who would love a partner of the calibre of NI.