Reporting Tools with Tcl

Reporting Tools with Tcl are some tools for building web pages or clients for presenting reporting data in a browser or a Tcl client.

I (apw) have built a tool a long time ago for administration of attributes of GUI's for building web pages or sending configuration parameters to a dumb client, which then builds a GUI using that information.

Therefore I have created (2008-12-05) a project at SF: [L1 ] named Reporting Tools with Tcl, where I will do a reimplementation of the ideas using itcl-ng (especially the new features with delegation and inheritance mixing) and putting the result into public domain.

The idea is to use sqlite as a database for the attributes administration and to put the administration tool called AppTool together with that database into a tclkit for easy deployment.

The first version will use Apache 1.3 and rivet as a server for the AppTool as well as for the reporting tools generated with the tool. AppTool will be self hosting which means the GUI of AppTool will also be built using AppTool.

For the future I would like a solution which uses Wub as the server, I only have not enough time to set that up right now. I am also planning to keep the stuff for displaying the GUI placed in separate files and the client administration in other files, to eventually be able to use ntkWidget instead of Tk later on with only replacing the parts for displaying and using the common interface for calling the parts for displaying.

Additionally there will be templates (web pages with embedded Tcl code) to retrieve data from a reporting database and to send (eventually prepared for presentation) these data to the GUI built by the client and to present these data in the GUI Reports, which will be table reports to present data like an excel sheet, tree reports to present data like file system trees in explorer and others (stay tuned).

One possible tool for filling the reporting database with the relevant data: ATALT

A paper to that topic presented at 9th European Tcl/Tk Users Meeting: Reporting Tools with Tcl History (How it started)