I see there's a Xataface printing module in progress. That video sure is cool!
I'm a web guy, and I tend to ignore getting things to print just so, but the users
of my app got spoiled by FileMaker and dabbledb when it comes to nicely
printed reports with grouping where the group headers are printed at the
top of each page, page numbers, and all that.
After searching high and low for some code to do this for me, I finally found rlib.
(the spam filter won't let me include many links; I expect you can find it
by following your nose from the print_report script in
https://bitbucket.org/DanC/hh-office/ )
The "Basic Charging" example is just what I was looking for, modulo klunky monospace fonts.
Getting it installed and figuring out the api (I used python) is non-trivial.
It's kinda old-school C. But it's fast and it works, as long as your report
definition is good.
My CGI script that drives it is print_report (in hh-office).
I'm using xataface actions to launch it; I'm still thinking about how to
control access to the reports.
I over-engineered things a little bit and used HTML to represent
the report definitions, converting to rlib's format on the fly; for example:
hh-office/templates/attendance_by_client.html
hh-office/templates/attendance_by_group.html
This is pretty tangentially related to xataface, thought it's pretty relevant
to "how do I build my own FileMaker-like app out of spare parts lying around the net?"