Delphi XE2 FireMonkey Reporting Options

5
votes

XE2 is out and I've noticed that FMX seems to not have any reporting options?

VCL has Fast Report and I think still Rave 10 - but nothing for FMX?

3
delphidelphi-xe2firemonkey
It's pretty early yet. Any reporting option for firemonkey would probably be for Mac OS X only, right? If the FastReport people haven't done it yet, my money is, nobody else can.... yet. Firemonkey is a "version 1.0" framework and I expect the list of things you can't do in FMX that you've been able to do in VCL for years now, to be quite long. – Warren P
I would guess it IS going to be difficult - but I'm showing TPrinter tied to the VCL with no real way of printing on FMX without hitting the platform's apis native...whoooooo boy. – Richard Holland
@Warren P - a FMX reporting option should be compatible with all platforms, not just OSX. – skamradt
Since firemonkey relies on OpenGL and DirectX as its common presentation layer, current Firemonkey tech offers zero clues as to how printing would work. Each platform's printing systems are wildly different. Cocoa on Mac, a complete mess on Linux, and Windows has its own printing system unlike anything else. Yes, it would be great if such a thing was on the way and soon, but I wouldn't hold my breath for it. – Warren P

3 Answers

3
votes

One possible solution (although windows only) would be to have a datasnap server generate the reports using rave/fast reports, exporting that to html/pdf and shipping the result to the client for display. Not perfect, but it closes the gap until a full FMX solution is available.

2
votes

Do they have a Rich Edit or HTML component with print capabilities? You could hobble together a reasonable reporting engine pretty quickly with one of those.

1
votes

You can combine VCL and FMX forms in a single project.
See: Delphi XE2: Possible to instantiate a FireMonkey Form in VCL application?

For the time being you can put the report form in VCL in your FMX application and maybe replace it with a pure FMX solution later on.
But that of course would be Windows only, probably not what you want.