Introduction

PythonReports is a toolkit aimed to build database reports in Python® programs. The toolkit includes the report builder and printout renderer for PDF output.

Report builder applies a template to a sequence of uniform data objects and produces a printout structure that can be saved in a file and/or rendered to PDF.

It is possible to render printouts for other presentation formats such as a specific printer language or a GUI toolkit display. There used to be printing output for wxPython and screen display for Tkinter and wxPython, but they fell out of use and their support is discontinued.

Requirements

PythonReports require Python version 2.7. Currently there are no plans of porting the code to Python3.

Report building and printout rendering require the ReportLab Toolkit. Reports containing images additionally require Python Imaging Library: Pillow (preferred) or PIL.

Templates in RSON format (introduced in v0.7.0) require rsonlite.

QR barcodes (introduced in v0.8.0) require qrcode.

Quick Start

A report is built from a list of data dictionaries or data objects having uniform structure. An example of such data is a list of rows fetched from an SQL server.

Report layout is defined by a template file which can have either XML format or a textual format based on rsonlite.

Report builder applies loaded template to a list of data objects and produces a printout structure. Printout can be saved in XML format.

PDF writer creates an output file from a printout structure.

There are example templates in the package sources: sakila.prt is in XML format, and sakila.prtr is the same template in RSON format. The data file for those templates can be found in the project downloads.

This is an example of building a PDF from that data:

import cPickle as pickle
from PythonReports.api import Builder, parse_rson, write_pdf

with open("sakila.dat", "rb") as data_file:
    data = pickle.load(data_file)[:200]
template = parse_rson("sakila.prtr")
build = Builder(template)
printout = build.run(data)
with open("sakila.prp", "wt") as printout_file:
    printout.write(printout_file)
# It is necessary to call .validate()
# on built or loaded printout
# before creating PDF output.
printout.validate()
write_pdf(printout, "sakila.pdf")