I’ve begun using Geraldo Reports in several current commercial jobs, and I’m finding that it’s not, well, exactly right for me.  But it’s so close.  I’ve forked it on Github:

https://github.com/Solomoriah/geraldo

You can, of course, track back to the original author’s project from there.  I’m just getting started on Github, but I’m liking it a lot.

What’s wrong with Geraldo?

First of all, it’s not being maintained.  It’s been 8 months since anything’s been done to it.  There are outstanding pull requests and issues, but there’s no sign that any of the needed work will ever be done.

Second, it’s a victim of premature abstraction.  It’s an excellent report generator, tied fairly tightly to Reportlab, but it also has all these added things… a plain text report generator and an XML exporter, for instance.  I can’t see any reason I’d ever want to use it to do an export… it’s like killing flies with a sledgehammer.

So I’ve started my own fork, as I’ve said.  I’ve applied the changes mentioned in the last three issues posted to the original project, and added a feature I needed for my production project.  It’s now possible to mark a group footer or the report summary to print on a new page by defining force_new_page_before (in the same way as the usual force_new_page variable).

As time goes on, I plan to strip out the features I don’t think “belong” in the package.  I don’t know when or if I’ll get to that part, though… despite feeling that they don’t belong, their presence doesn’t disturb me all that much.