Anatomy of an Output Class - Conclusion

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Generating "spreadsheet" PDFs can be a real hassle, and I sought to relieve myself of that hassle by writing an Output class, which is itself far from perfect. For larger data sets or for PDFs that don't follow the format of a (potentially) multi-page set of rows and columns of data, my class is of limited use. I suspect that a number of the methods I've used to perform certain tasks could be optimized or reworked to be more user-friendly, and I won't release any code until I've had a chance to do that reworking. 

I offer this summary of my efforts, with particular emphasis on the parts of the class that gave me problems, in hopes that it may be useful to others developing similar pieces of code. My primary flaw was one of design -- I hadn't fully considered some of the problems that might arise before I waded in and developed the first draft of the class. I have attempted here to expose some of the issues that escaped my initial attention and to offer groundwork toward workable solutions for those issues.

The end result has been very satisfying for me. Where before, the creation of a new PDF report meant copying an old report and spending a few hours doing the tedious work of tweaking widths and positions buried in a couple of thousands of lines of code, I can now copy the above code sample, apply a few tweaks to handle data formatting and building of graphs, and be done with it. 

Time for development of our routine reports has been reduced significantly, and code maintenance is much easier. The class is currently about 1150 lines. (The graph code itself is about 200 lines.) Of course, that count includes code for the other three types of output as well, along with ample comments. The code is cleaner and much more portable than what we had been using before building the class. With all its headaches and boils and bruises, the Output class has proven most beneficial.

Note

In retrospect, this could stand to be changed. The value should always be in the value field instead of crossing over this way.

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