Improving Reports

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the Gramps report system. In my mind, writing database code is routine and thankless, and writing GUI code is uninteresting. But the report system holds the power to give you infinite views into your data and to share it with other people. Personally, I think it is the most compelling reason to use Gramps. What good is a geneology database that can hold 100,000 people with a great user interface if you can’t get your data out?

I intended to work on reports during the development of the 2.2 series, but somehow the whole “Gramps on Windows” thing distracted me. So all I had time for was bug fixing. Now that “Gramps on Windows” is mostly behind me, I hope to concentrate on the report system during the 2.3 series.

Here are some of the things I hope to work on:

  • Clean up report interface
  • Make a clearer distinction between textDoc and drawDoc
  • Possibly add bookDoc
  • Document the report API
  • Add TOC and Index generation to the book report
  • Implement a couple of reports from the report specifications on the wiki
  • Convert HTML and (hopefully) GTK print to book report formats (in addition to OOo and ODF).
  • Improve source display (endnotes)

If you have any ideas that can help the report system, please share them on the mailing list or the wiki.

1 Comment

  • Boris Shtrasman

    Perhaps another thing if I could ask for ?
    Creating of a printable report that will have all the information.

    For now I create a web site , create a ancestor tree from a person then create a descendant tree for each root (the great-great-… grandfather) create a pdf file with the web site TOC and the charts.

    This kind of report(or perhaps it already exists ) would more then helpful in cases a printed version is in need.

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