Hi Support,
As
others before me, I've searched for documentation without luck. The
main source of information is the GridExport file (pas and dfm) in the
IW12FeaturesDemo program.
Not much explanation,
but at least I could see how to use it. One of the things I was missing
to begin with was the that the TIWAdvWebGridPDFIO.AdvWebGrid property
should be set to the name of the actual grid one wants export. Fair
enough, but with no such property in Object Inspector, and no
description, it took a while to figure it out. Later I learned it is
actually a published property of the ...EXCELIO component. I wonder why
it is not in the ...PDFIO component.
The second parameter, I have not yet figured out what to do with. I
see it is set with "WebApplication" in the FeatureDemo, but why, I do
know. Being a parameter, I suppose it is intended as a possibility to
use various values. It would be nice to know which though.
Also
the 3rd parameter (true/false) of the PDFEXPORT function. No
description of what it is for, and not used, nor described, in the
features demo, it was only by chance I noticed as I was searching the
forum for other issues:
With False it
creates a file on disk, with the name and in the folder you define in
the first parameter, e.g.: 'c:\documents\filename.pdf' or whatever URL
you want. If you do not give any other that the filename, it is saved in
the same folder as the EXE file. Not good if you as user do not have
access to it...
With True (the default),
it is showing the PDF onscreen in the browser. Very fine if you want to
save it somewhere, but the way it is shown, leave no way of coming back
to the page it was exported from, depending on which browser you use.
I would therefore propose the following enhancements for a coming update:
Add all relevant properties to the Object inspector, for both PDFIO and EXCELIO.
Create
a (simple) documentation, describing the use of both PDFIO and EXCELIO,
with all parameters and possible values, and maybe with some more
detailed examples than the few lines in the FeaturesDemo.
I
know it is difficult for the developers to find the time to document
these things, but turn it around and try to imagine how much time is
lost by the many who is trying to figure out how to use it, when there
is no documentation available.
Regards
Soren