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
-------

.. toctree::
    :maxdepth: 1

    installing
    tutorial-hello-world
    tutorial-django
    tutorial-web2py
    basic
    widgets
    graphics
    barcodes
    cross-reference
    generators
    caching
    utils
    examples/index
    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**
