Suggestions to make this app even better

[2001 JI Open Discussion]

By: brian - brian_maguire1

Suggestions to make this app even better

2003-03-15 05:56

BTW- Great tool and lots of promise!

 

These are some small and some big things that would make it a lot easier to create slick looking reports in a productive manner. Some deas maybe for Jasper and some maybe user error but if I screwed it up likely someone else did too :-)

 

A) Collision Detection: Some type of an alert when you drag and element on top of another element. When you do this the element disappears but you never know until you compile a report. I guess you can call it collision detection. You could also make a smart feature that automatically correcs the overlaps.

 

B) Automatically uncheck the transparent box when you select the background color of an element. Took about 20 minutes figure out why the background color was not showing up.

 

C) Element band switching: If you drag an element to a new band it would be cool if the element switched the band setting for that element. That way when you have an element that is simular or the same you can copy and paste the element and then drag it to a new band.

 

D) MultiElements: Ability to select multiple elements and apply properties to all of them rather than one at a time. Especially the text properties such as font, fontsize, style ect. Kind of a drag to click 15 elements to change the font size.

 

E) Page Break: Would be nice to have a page break in the HTML reports. All it would need to do is pass the <br style="page-break-before:always;"> . You can do this manually but it would be killer if it was automatic.

 

F) Lines: I know it was mentioned in the listserve but it would be really nice if the line tool worked with HTML reports without having to manually edit the XML or use ____ as a text element.

 

G) Events: Ability to change the color, font, or style based on an elements value. For example: If the student on the report got a 64 on the report you would the color would be bold and red on the report.

 

H) More on the Report Wizard: Have a wizard like interface that helps create a report based on templates etc... apply cool styles etc.. It would make it easier to get started. However some of these manual features changes would make a bigger impact.

 

G) Support for Arial font. Seems like it has every font other than Arial. Maybe for a reason.

 

H) Table Tool: Ability to place elements in a table with broders.

 

I) Short Cut keys for the Align: Select multiple elemenst and then clicking align top is a cool feature but it would be cool if you could do it with a short cut key would spread it up.

 

J) Text Properties from the tool bar: Right now you have to double click, click a tab, select the settings and then close. It would be nice if you could do some onf the text properties such as font, size, etc... from the tool bar.

 

K) CSS: It would be nice if there was a CSS element to pass in a style sheet for HTML reports. You could probably make the HTML reports a lot nicer looking.

 

Also it would ne nice if they applied class names to the elements and tables so you could use an external style sheet to apply some better design.

 

I hope this helps! Great program! I am sure it will keep getting better.

 

Brian