Home > Archive > PERL Modules > May 2007 > Re: HTML::Dashboard (Spreadsheet-like formatting for HTML tables)
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Re: HTML::Dashboard (Spreadsheet-like formatting for HTML tables)
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| On Apr 16, 3:50 pm, "pkj" <jan...@mailaps.org> wrote:
> I am looking for comments on a new Perl module. The purpose of the
> module is to take a data set (e.g. from a DB query), apply a bunch of
> formatting rules, and render the resulting information in the form of
> an HTML table.
>
> Why this module?
> =============
>
> For reports delivered via the web, it is often desirable to be able to
> apply data-dependent formatting rules, such as:
> - shading every second row to make reading easier
> - highlighting table cells (or rows, or columns) when some condition
> is fullfilled (e.g. when the value of cell is outside of some range)
> - passing the content through some random formatting filter (such as
> sprintf(...) or substr(...))
>
> It is often also desirable to be able to sort the data (on a random
> column) or to restrict the set of columns included in the report.
>
> It is quite painful to build and apply such rules in an ad-hoc fashion
> while building the HTML table from a data set. (In particular when
> working on a one-off report which should take no more than half an
> hour to write.)
>
> Hence a module to take care of all of that.
>
> Proposal:
> =======
>
> I have put together a module (tentatively named HTML::Dashboard),
> which allows the programmer to specify a number of formatting rules,
> which will be applied to the data as it is rendered into HTML. The
> module is currently in alpha, and I am looking for comments (in
> particular in regards to usability, features, documentation, bugs).
>
> The best way to get an idea of what the module (currently) can do is
> to look at some examples. I put together a "gallery" show-casing the
> most important features. You can find it here:
> http://www.beyondcode.org/projects/...rd/gallery.html
>
> The POD can be found here:
> http://www.beyondcode.org/projects/dashboard/index.html
>
> and the download here:
> http://www.beyondcode.org/projects/...ard-0.01.tar.gz
>
> Questions:
> ========
>
> Feel free to take a look and let me know what you think. In
> particular, I'd like to know: Is this useful? And does it work?
>
> Is the documentation understandable (the API is uncomfortably large,
> in my opinion)?
>
> Is anything missing?
>
> And finally, I am looking for comments on the proposed module name.
> It's not perfect - any better ideas?
Well, unless I'm missing something you could call it Data::Table, :-).
Keith
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