On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Gideon King <[email protected]> wrote: > I absolutely agree that it's possible to moderately easily set up a view > hierarchy that will allow for automatic pagination etc and work with object > oriented methodologies to accomplish the goal, but there is a certain amount > of grunt work in doing this, and the whole point of having frameworks is to > handle the common repeatable cases like printing tables. > > After all, they are always automatically going to be row based, so with a > little bit of work on Apple's part, it would be easy enough to have a > configuration item to say for it to print with or without the header, and > maybe a callback to find out whether it can split a particular row, and if > so, where. Then everyone would automatically get the printing capabilities > without everyone having to reinvent the wheel.
I think it's important to recognize the boundary of functionality that Apple has established for NSTableView. It exists to display data with a certain appearance, which is appropriate for on-screen display but not for on-paper. The appearance NSTextView is designed to achieve, on the other hand, is appropriate for both. If Apple were to provide a print-oriented table or report class, I would expect and hope it was separate from NSTableView. NSTableView is very much an onscreen control, and its design reflects such. > And besides this, you have already got a component optimised for retrieving > the data and displaying it in a table, so it makes sense to be using that for > the user interface. So I don't want to have to be building a separate > mechanism just to print it - it's like doubling the work, and from the user's > perspective, they can work within the mental framework of getting the table > the way they want it (showing the right columns at the right size in the > right order), and then saying "print *this*" i.e. wysiwyg. Speaking from direct experience here: even if you write your own table-like view, you wind up doing the work twice anyway, once for screen and once for print. :) --Kyle Sluder _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
