Overview

Geraldo is a reports engine with its own API, created in Python language to output PDFs and other formats for complex reports.

Its workflow is the following:

1. You declare a Report class with your report structure and definitions;
2. Instantiate your Report class, providing a queryset with a list of objects;
3. Call report’s ‘generate_by’ method, providing the generator class and filename output (can be a filename or file output). It will generate a file in hard disk or in memory;
4. Do what you want with the output: you can return it in an HttpResponse, keep it in a file, etc.

Content

• Installing
• Tutorial to say Hello
• Tutorial using Django
• Tutorial using Web2Py
• Basic Reference
• Widgets Reference
• Graphics Reference
• Barcodes Reference
• Cross-Reference Tables Reference
• Generators Reference
• Caching
• Utilities Reference
• Examples
• Backward Incompatible Changes
• Next Steps
• Authors

Features

Geraldo does most of what any reports engine does. It provides the following features:

• A detail band, the report driver
• Page header, Page footer, Report begin and Report summary bands
• Grouping in multiple levels
• SubReports to print childs
• Multi-formats compatible in output (even if we only have PDF for a while)
• Child bands, to attach helper bands to other ones
• Support Django or any other Python framework/application
• Graphic elements (including images and shapes)
• System fields (to show report title, page numbers, current date/time, etc.)
• Reports composition (you can reuse your bands for other reports)
• Reports inheritance (you can use the same structure for a lot of reports)
• A powerful stylizing support (colors, fonts, sizes, etc.)
• Different page sizes
• Flexibility to be easily customized
• Aggregation functions
• Hiding/showing bands and elements
• Events system

Dependencies

Geraldo is fully dependent on ReportLab, not only because of its PDF generation, but also its units and styles library. We have tested with ReportLab version 2.1

Geraldo is not Django-dependent, but it can work as a Django pluggable application.

A very little demo of how Geraldo works

from geraldo import Report, DetailBand, ObjectValue
from geraldo.utils import cm
from geraldo.generators import PDFGenerator

names = ['Mychelle', 'Leticia', 'Tarsila', 'Marta', 'Vera', 'Leni']

class MyReport(Report):
    class band_detail(DetailBand):
        height=0.7*cm
        elements=[
            ObjectValue(attribute_name='capitalize'),
            ]

report = MyReport(queryset=names)
report.generate_by(PDFGenerator, filename='female-names.pdf')

This code above will output your report, driven by the queryset ‘objects_list’, into file ‘cars_list.pdf’.

Now, an example in a Django view:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from geraldo import Report, DetailBand, ObjectValue
from geraldo.generators import PDFGenerator
from geraldo.utils import cm

class MyReport(Report):
    class band_detail(DetailBand):
        height=0.7*cm
        elements=[
            ObjectValue(attribute_name='username'),
            ]

def my_view(request):
    response = HttpResponse(mimetype='application/pdf')

    objects_list = User.objects.all() # If you are using Django
    report = MyReport(queryset=objects_list)

    report.generate_by(PDFGenerator, filename=response)

    return response

As you can see, now returned the PDF output to HttpResponse, instead of a file.

License

Geraldo is under Lesser Gnu Public License, take a look on the following URL to read it:

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html

Authors

Geraldo has been created by Marinho Brandao a brazilian Django and Python enthusiast.

Home page: http://marinhobrandao.com/

E-mail: marinho at gmail dot com