Is there a reporting library which can be linked with a Qt application to generate and print invoices (from within my own application, no seperate tool). The invoices are needed to print instantly, so I have the following requirements:
- pipe data to be printed into the reporting library
- choose from a predefined reporting template (created inside or outside my app doesn't matter)
- integrated report generation inside my application
- no preview-before-print - just create an order and print the invoice
- based on Linux
- document header / footer with delivery instructions, address and slogan
- tableized line items, with sub items and line price / item price
- order summary (total price, tax)
- multiple pages should repeat table headers and show partial sums
- nice to have: inclusion of dynamically generated image data
What is not needed/wanted:
- Generate reports outside the application from SQL, CSV, or XML datasets
- The report generator does not need to do the calculations
The environment is a custom-built POS system for food delivery / catering / restaurant. Orders come in by phone. Invoices are printed as two copies, one for the kitchen to prepare the delivery, one for the customer (and driver who delivers).
I am currently working with RichText-based templates but this is pretty cumbersome and the templates are hard to maintain - so this change is needed. The old application is Qt3 but the new one will be (and has to be) Qt4 - so the reporting library should be compatible with that. I don't want to pull in Gtk or Gnome dependencies.
The database runs on MySQL but doesn't (yet) store the ordering data neither any invoices. Invoices are just archived to the harddisk. This will probably change, but I don't think this matters when I can feed in data manually to the reporting lib.
Update: My POS application is going to be opensourced, so the library should be compatible with GPL or similar.