On Fri September 23 2005 04:31 pm, Chris Withers wrote:
Ron Bickers wrote:
I have no idea. Maybe it'll do what you want, but I don't understand what it really does just from the description. The work I needed to do was external to Zope anyway (reading data from a MySQL database, building PDFs with Reportlab, sending email), so it's actually better that I'm outside of it.
The open source Reportlab library right? From what I've seen of their closed source stuff, it's way fast enough to do this all on the fly...
What I was doing wasn't fast enough; there were plenty of complaints from customers. But to be fair, it wasn't Reportlab that was slow. The process had to retrieve hundreds (sometimes over a thousand) of name/address records from a database, calculate the length of the longest line in each when printed with a given font, pass that information to Reportlab to format a page that would print each address centered on a label (not center-aligned, but left-aligned with the whole thing in the center of the label), attach the resulting PDF to an email and send it on. I suspect the slowest part was going through each of the hundreds of records and calculating the size, but it really didn't matter; the whole thing took too long to do on the fly. Reportlab is *nice*, BTW. -- Ron