Multi dependencies for dynamic tables ?

[nicolasBBS]

Hello,

Sorry for my poor english (I'm french...), I'll try to explain my problem and the solution that I suggest.

I'm trying the trial version of Dycodoc, and I'm impressed by its power and simplicity.
The only - but important - lack I found at the moment is about making tables :
As it is impossible to make two "top to bottom" dependencies from one object to two other objects, we are in the incapacity of making tables with dynamic cells height.
For example, I'd like to make a 2x2 cells table.
I begin making each cell to be dynamic at bottom.
After I make the top edge of the bottom left cell dependent of the bottom edge of the top left cell.
And then the same thing for right cells.
At this stage, I have two columns, but cells are not horizontally aligned.
If I could have a second dependence of the top edge of the bottom left cell onto the bottom edge of the top right cell, and vice-versa, it would be good, assuming that for each group of dependencies, the biggest Y value is considered (drawing cell edges should be done separately of text boxes).

If you extent this idea to right to left dependences, you can make auto-sizing tables, and many other things which are actually impossible to do.

Actually I was about to buy Enterprise version of your product, but this point is a big problem for me. I you have no solution, I'll have to compute tables in my application, using only VPE and do without the power of Dycodoc templates.

Best regards,

Nicolas.

[IDEAL Software Support]

We are working on a report generator extension for dycodoc, so it can create itself lists and tables. The release is next year.

With the current version, you should indeed create the dynamic tables / lists of a document yourself by code, using VPE.

But dycodoc can assist you:

First of all, you can layout all static parts of a document (e.g. an invoice) with dycodoc, i.e. headers, footers, address field, etc.

Second, you can layout all the elements of a table in dycodoc and set the object properties to:
- viewable = false
- printable = false
- streamable = false

This way, the objects virtually do not exist. But you can query their positions and dimensions from the template using the VPE API and create yourself dynamic tables accordingly. I.e. you pre-layout a table in dycodoc, but do generate the final table with VPE.