Rima,
Some comments for consideration:
It's not explicit in the document, but can library
components be "compound" components? For example, I might create a standard
report heading that I want to include in all my reports. This might be a Grid
with an image in one cell, text such as company name/address in other cells, a
place holder for the report title etc. In my report design, I just want to drag
in the whole "Corporate Report Heading" item as one unit. I think this will be a
common usage scenario, so it should be explicit in the document.
[Rima Kanguri] Yes library
components can be "compound". Ok will add some of the common usage
scenarios.
To confirm, the document indicates that I can override
some properties in a library component and other properties would not be
affected -- correct? So, using the above example, I could change the report
title font in the heading to Italics and all other properties such as color,
font size, etc. would still be as defined in the library. This is is a excellent
feature -- it might be useful to the readers to include an example to make sure
this is clear.
[Rima
Kanguri] Yes, right now we do plan to allow user to override properties of the ReportItem,
but note user cannot change the
structure, like cannot change the number of columns of a
table.
I'm a little concerned that libraries cannot use
libraries themselves. I'd be interested to hear other community feedback in this
area. One example is where a developer would like to have a a library of base
level components that are common to all reports in an organization (that set
things like font style and color, maybe some standard business calculations,
etc.), and then some more "advanced" components that build on these. The more
advanced components would need to use other components from the base level
library. The reason that the more advanced components are not in the base
library is that they are not needed for all reports. This would be similar to
how libraries are used in traditional software development.
[Rima
Kanguri] We are investigating to see if we can support
this.
Performance -- It is likely that people will build
libraries that include a lot of components, but each report will use only a few
of these components. In this scenario, we need to ensure that the large library
does not slow down the individual report generation
time.
Paul.
