Hi all, I've never used Freereport, but I have used FastReport 2.4x through 3.x quite a bit.

I tried evaluating LazReport a few months ago and had problems with aggregate functions cause AV's and stalling the program. I thought I'd give it another go with svn rev.15082 and while I won't rule out the fact that I may be doing something wrong, I can't seem to get it to act right for anything but the simplest listing reports without aggregate functions whatsoever.

Has anyone used this component for any significant reports? Again, I've never used FreeReport per se, only the commercial FastReport version so I'm assuming that I have at least enough knowledge to build a simple report with aggregates, but my impression thus far is that the component just seems unusable for me.

Again, I could be just doing something wrong as I'm sure that there were significant changes between the FreeReport version and FastReport 2x or 3x.

Reporting is significant to an application (well the back office portion) that I'm hoping to write with Lazarus/Freepascal and without a viable solution, I stuck with using Delphi or Visual Studio/Mono.

Thanks for any feedback.

BTW, I've been playing around with PowerPDF today and it looks pretty capable.

I am also a FastReport user:
FreeReport is just an early FastReport 2.x version, so if it worked in FastReport 2.x, it should work in FreeReport/lazReport.

It's of course possible that during porting, some bugs were introduced.

The Fastreport People told me (back in October) that they planned to port FastReport 4 to Lazarus in Q1 of this year. Since I haven't seen anything yet, I assume that some problems popped up. I'm not altogether surprised because it's not an easy task, given the complexity of FastReport :-)

Michael.

Lee, I used it for simple reporting with Delphi 7 and I like it.

Antonio

Lee Jenkins wrote

Reporting is significant to an application (well the back office portion) that I'm hoping to write with Lazarus/Freepascal and without a viable solution, I stuck with using Delphi or Visual Studio/Mono.

I have not user FreeReports or LazReports yet, so can't comment on them. I wouldn't dismiss Lazarus/Free Pascal that quickly though. ;-)

I have a RTF based report engine which might come in handy as well. I use it to report off my tiOPF objects, but it can report from TDataset's as well, or both. You can create custom fields (tags) for use in your reports as well. So you are only limited to what Free Pascal can do! :)

The RTF report engine was originally written for Delphi and tiOPF. I ported it to Free Pascal and fpGUI. It should work as-is for Lazarus. I commented out the image support due to fpGUI lacking JPEG support, but that should be fairly straight forward to get working with Lazarus (as it's much closer to how Delphi works). I can email you in private the original and ported RTF engine if you want. It's one unit and a sample application.

BTW: I use OpenOffice to view reports and design the rtf report templates. I have even created a OpenOffice macro to convert the generated rtf to pdf before it gets viewed by the user.

BTW #2: I still want to have a look at PowerPDF as well. That would be handy for non-Lazarus based applications as well.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Agreed. FastReport is an excellent reporting tool and I would like very much to get it to work, but it appears that remains to be seen as of now.

Well that give me an excuse to upgrade, but I am fairly satisfied with FR 3 right now. :)

I can imagine that is must be a fairly daunting task!

Thanks Antonia,

Hopefully its just something I'm doing wrong, but its hard to say since the FreeReport lists are not very active except for spammers. :)

Hi Graeme,

That is the whole point, to use Lazarus/FreePascal! I want freedom of platform! I already know I that can (and am, for that matter) writing the major (front office) portion of my application in Laz/FPC.

I'll take a look-see, but I'd rather not have 3rd party requirements for reporting if I can help it. PowerPDF seems pretty tight to me, even is there is no banded report designer. Maybe if you would send me what you have for your rtf engine, I could see how it might be used as a basis for one with PowerPDF.

Fortunately, I will not need to start writing reports for quite a while yet so I can wait to see how LaReport shapes up. Just knowing I could use PowerPDF (after playing with it a bit yesterday) is enough for me if LazReport doesn't seem viable by the time I have to start on reporting. Nice to have options. :)

BTW, I noticed that the PDF export filter that was written for FreeReport uses PowerPDF for its engine.

Thanks to all for your input!

First of all few products are already ported to fpc/lazarus. It is FastScript - script engine and FastCube - desktop olap engine (pivot table). Next one will be FastQueryBuilder. It almost works and even sqldb connection were made exclusively for fpc :)
When all of them will work 100% on lazarus we will start FastReport port. I hope for that moment lcl will have much less bugs :)

Best regards,
Paul Ishenin.

I meant non-LCL based apps, but still using Free Pascal compiler. This would still gives you the freedom of platform.

eg: Generating reports from fpGUI based or Console based applications using PowerPDF would be cool. I still need to look at the PowerPDF code, so I don't know if it relies on LCL or not.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Thanks Antonia,

Oh dear :-)). Broadly speaking, here in Italy, words that terminate with "a" vowel are feminine ;). So, here is Antonio ^_^ (just joking ;) )

Hopefully its just something I'm doing wrong, but its hard to say since the FreeReport lists are not very active except for spammers. :)

Well, Graeme reporting is not really bad. I still have to look at it but I like the idea very much, very versatile.

Antonio

<looking_sheepish/>
My apologies Antonio, no offense was meant. My brain is too fast for my fingers sometimes because I knew that!

Yes, I am looking forward to taking a look at it as well. Graeme has excellent coding skills and a very ordered mind judging from his works I have had the pleasure to use.

Paul,

That is very good news indeed! I like FastScript very much and I am glad that it is already ported, but is my version that came with FR3 able to work or must I upgrade to use it in Laz/FPC?

Ah, my mistake. I believe it does. At the least, I tried removing LCL from the packages requirements and it would not compile complaining of not finding LCLType...

As you mentioned, I guess you could always use it as a dll/so or console app from fpGUI based application.

2008/5/14 Lee Jenkins :

As you mentioned, I guess you could always use it as a dll/so or console app from fpGUI based application.

Until I port it to FCL only!  ;-)

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

You need to upgrade your FS version.

Best regards,
Paul Ishenin.

Out of curiosity Paul, what is the version I need to be for FPC support?

Hi,

I'm really looking forward to see a new and improved LazReport.

I'm working on porting an application to MacOSX Carbon, and I've had troubles using LazReport on Carbon - it crashes.

I've been working on other parts of the application, but will be working on LazReport on Carbon tomorrow, and will try to locate causes for some exceptions when trying to print reports, that otherwise is working OK on LazReport for Win32.

Anybody working on Carbon side of LazReport?

Good work.
Cheers, Normann