Generating reports

A database without exporting facilities is of little use. Ghini lets you export your data in table format (open them in your spreadsheet editor of choice), as labels (to be printed or engraved), as html pages or pdf or postscript documents.

The Report Tool

You activate the Report Tool from the main menu: Tools‣Report. The Report Tools acts on a selection, so first select something, then start the Report Tool.

Report on the whole collection.

To produce a report on your whole plant collection, a shortcut would be from the home screen, to click on the Families: in use cell.

If your focus is more on the garden location than on taxonomy and accessions, you would click on the Locations: total cell.

Reports are produced by a report engine, making use of a report template. Ghini relies upon two different report engines (Mako & XSL), and offers several report templates, meant as usable examples.

Choose the report you need, specify parameters if required, and produce the report. Ghini will open the report in the associated application.

Configuring report templates, that’s a task for who installs and configures ghini at your institution. Basically, you create a template name, indicating the report engine and specifying the template. Configured templates are static, once configured you are not expected to alter them. Only the special **scratch** template can be modified on the fly.

The remainder of this page provides technical information and links regarding the formatter engines, and gives hints on writing report templates. Writing templates comes very close to writing a computer program, and that’s beyond the scope of this manual, but we have hints that will definitely be useful to the interested reader.

Using the Mako Report Formatter

The Mako report formatter uses the Mako template language for generating reports. More information about Mako and its language can be found at makotemplates.org.

The Mako templating system should already be installed on your computer if Ghini is installed.

Creating reports with Mako is similar in the way that you would create a web page from a template. It is much simpler than the XSL Formatter(see below) and should be relatively easy to create template for anyone with a little but of programming experience.

The template generator will use the same file extension as the template which should indicate the type of output the template with create. For example, to generate an HTML page from your template you should name the template something like report.html. If the template will generate a comma separated value file you should name the template report.csv.

The template will receive a variable called values which will contain the list of values in the current search.

The type of each value in values will be the same as the search domain used in the search query. For more information on search domains see search-domains.

If the query does not have a search domain then the values could all be of a different type and the Mako template should prepared to handle them.

Using the XSL Report Formatter

The XSL report formatter requires an XSL to PDF renderer to convert the data to a PDF file. Apache FOP is is a free and open-source XSL->PDF renderer and is recommended.

If using Linux, Apache FOP should be installable using your package manager. On Debian/Ubuntu it is installable as fop in Synaptic or using the following command:

apt-get install fop

Installing Apache FOP on Windows

You have two options for installing FOP on Windows. The easiest way is to download the prebuilt ApacheFOP-0.95-1-setup.exe installer.

Alternatively you can download the archive. After extracting the archive you must add the directory you extracted the archive to to your PATH environment variable.