Business application developer's wishlist

[Ron White]

I am new to PureBasic so some of what I am about to ask may exist already. If so, please correct me.

I noticed a request for a grid gaget in an earlier post and would just like to say I think a good grid gaget is very important to business developers.

Another request is PDF file support from PB. As a business developer I am frequently asked to provide faxing, emailing and PDF archive functionality for invoices, purchase orders, quotations, .etc. and to be able to scan in supporting documents that need to be archived along with these forms.

Also, as a business developer, creating presentation quality reports that can be viewed on screen, printed or exported to Excel or some other office application is a frequent need. What I have seen of the printing functionality seems a little on the light side. I did not see a way to interface to the windows standard printer dialog though access to the file open dialog and about four other standard dialogs is available.

I also have a requirement to attach to a couple of databases that use ActiveX controls as their access method. Is this supported?

Thanks,
Ron

[Karbon]

I am new to PureBasic so some of what I am about to ask may exist already. If so, please correct me.

You should take a look at the feature request forum just the same..

Another request is PDF file support from PB. As a business developer I am frequently asked to provide faxing, emailing and PDF archive functionality for invoices, purchase orders, quotations, .etc. and to be able to scan in supporting documents that need to be archived along with these forms.

There are lots of 3rd party PDF DLL solutions - integrating something like this into the language would be interesting, but I don't think it should or would happen.. I use PDFLib http://www.pdflib.com for a lot of web applications and highly suggest it for others. It is commercial but it's certainly commercial grade software.

Also, as a business developer, creating presentation quality reports that can be viewed on screen, printed or exported to Excel or some other office application is a frequent need. What I have seen of the printing functionality seems a little on the light side. I did not see a way to interface to the windows standard printer dialog though access to the file open dialog and about four other standard dialogs is available.

I can't speak much about the native printing support in PB but if you're bundling several topics into one. Integration with Excel and other Office applications is possible - search the forums.

I also have a requirement to attach to a couple of databases that use ActiveX controls as their access method. Is this supported?

The native database access is all done through ODBC if that helps. I don't really know what you mean by "attach" either - if that's a Windows term then you'll have to excuse my inexperience in Windows programming. What kind of databases is this- Access?

Good luck!

[ebs]

I did not see a way to interface to the windows standard printer dialog...

Ron,

If I understand you correctly, you should be able to use the "PrintRequester()" function to display the Windows printer dialog.


Regards,
Eric

[Num3]

My 2 cents...

I've donne a couple of commercial apps with PB. Never had a single complain so far, and they are working for a year now !

About the PDF issue, there is no native support, but i got an idea, Open Office has PDF print functionality, maybe someone can download the source and build a library for Purebasic based on that code

About print functionalities, well you have to make'hem all by hand, I did this for my apps, and posted part of those routines here in the forums.

Personally i've dropped ODBC and MS databases, i only use SQLITE, which is free, stable, very fast and integrated into Purebasic with a 3rd party library.

I've seen some code on the forums that exports values into an Excel database, using an ODBC connection, maybe that can help you!

That's about it for 2 cts

[Ron White]

Thanks to those that replied.

I did scan the features request list. That is how I knew someone had previously made a request for a grid gaget. I also understand that there is third party PDF software available. My request was for PDF functionality to become a native part of PureBasic. PDF has became the international standard for document exchange between businesses and it is important, in my opinion, for the functionality to be native. I realize that the primary focus of PureBasic has probably been game development. But after having a look at the demo version it appears that with a little added functionality it could become an excellent business application development platform. The database I am referring to is an IBM database called UniVerse. It and its sister database called UniData are installed in more than 100,000 companies with several million users.

My use of the word "access" is not the name of a database. It means, "gaining entry to" a database. ODBC is not an adequate means of database access in a high transaction environment for most databases. Also, my use of the word "attach" means to connect to the database.

Ron

[Karbon]

I agree that PDF documents are becoming more and more used but I don't know of any programming language that has any kind of native suppport for PDF generation.. I'll be looking into a lot of PDF libraries soon - I'll be sure to let the PB community know if I find anything interesting..

[Ron White]

PHP has a PDF library. It was originally developed by Thomas Merz and has been integrated into PHP. Seems like I have heard of another language that does. I think it may be a language for Mac OS X but memory fails me.

[Karbon]

PHP only links to the PDFlib library - it's not native. You can use that same PDFlib in PureBasic too if you'd like (Well, if they had a windows DLL that is)..

Don't get me wrong, I think PDFs are great - I just got the iSEDQuickPDF DLL yesterday and started making PDFs in PureBasic with it..

[BlairH]

I am a professional accountant and learned to program to aid my daily job fuctions, first VBA then VB6. After Microsoft said that they would no longer support VB6 I started to look for a new language and settled on PureBasic after looking at several others. A lot of my programs need to access Excel and/or Access. I built a program to track changes in Labour Rates using ODBC and Access only to find that I could not go backwards using ODBC. I was very excited when COM was added but again disappointed to find out that the script is way beyond me. But if I could gain access to COM would open up a whole new world to me.

We live in a Microsoft world and it would be nice to use all the tools that we get with VB like easy access to the COM.

I would like to be access to a report writer like crystal reports to use with Microsoft Access or Excel.

Also I would like a example of COM access Microsoft Access database.

I do not want to build games I what to build business appications that access Excel and Access that have first class reports.

Just my 2 cents.

Blair

[waffle]

sounds like you guys are asking for a database control that automatically connects to an existing database. To do one from scratch is alot of work.
Next you'll be asking for controlls that do OLE and DDE 8O