[fpc-pascal] fpReport released

[Michael Van Canneyt]

Hello,

A long time wait. But it finally made it:

fpreport has been committed to FPC SVN: packages/fcl-report.
It should compile on windows, linux, freebsd and darwin.

Features and architecture are described on:
http://wiki.freepascal.org/FPReport

Short highlights:
- Banded report design.
- Streaming to JSON, streaming XML is on TODO.
- Expressions using fpexprpars.
- No GUI Dependencies.
- Unit tested.
- Standard support for Memo (with HTML tags embedded), image, shape and checkbox elements
- Data loop for Dataset, JSON data, collections, lists, event driven.
- Framework for extending with other elements (demo contains polygon).
- Export out of the box to following format:
   - Pure HTML.
     (TOC pages, optional use of frames, highly configurable)
   - Images (with option to generate HTML container pages. Currently requires
     FreeType on windows)
   - PDF (using fcl-pdf)

There are 11 demo reports in a command-line.
There is also a standalone webdemo with the same demos, which shows that fpreport can be used very easily
in a headless webserver.

The LCL support has been committed to lazarus: components/fpreport.
It contains:
- Preview (export to LCL canvas)
- Printing.
- Design-time support for a report.
- Stand-alone designer, with support for accessing data from:
   CSV, DBF, SQLDB, JSON File, any REST service that exports JSON.
   Allows preview and export to all known formats.
- LCL demo program.

Todo:
- XML 
- Remove freetype dependency.
- subreport.
- crosstab.
- chart support.

Exporters for FPGUI and AggPas are also available, I expect that Graeme
Geldenhuys will commit them soon.

Please remember, this is a first release. There are some known bugs and
shortcomings. Feel free to report anything you find in the bugtracker,
suggestions are also welcome.

Enjoy,

Michael.
[5~