Lately I’ve been going through Typica in advance of its next release and adding some much needed polish. Today my attention turned to the reports system.

In the current release version if you want to add a custom report you need to

1. Write the report file.
2. Modify your top level configuration file to reference the new report.
3. Add an item to any reports menu you might have.
4. Write a bit of JavaScript to instantiate the report when that menu item is selected.
5. Scratch your head and try to find out which file you didn’t save or what typo you made when it doesn’t work.

In the next release (1.4) if you want to add a new report you need to

1. Drop the report file into the appropriate directory.

That’s it. (in other words, I’m now doing things the un-backwards way like everybody else) Naturally, that makes it a lot easier for someone to come up with a new report and share it with others. It goes from a process that requires understanding how Typica works (or very carefully following an excessively long and detailed set of instructions) to a process of download this file and save it in that here. If you have custom reports of your own, it just takes one new line in the report file to make it usable in the new system and old and new style reports can coexist in the same menu structure (though the new style ones will always be listed first).

New reports were added, existing reports were improved, and reports were grouped into categories so they’re no longer in a flat menu structure (not a big deal with only a few reports, but that list is only going to get larger over time).

There’s still a lot of room for improvement here in terms of making it easier to write the report files (or removing the need to write report files), but that’s going to have to wait for some other time as I had hoped 1.4 would have been out by now.