Metadata-Version: 2.1
Name: cubicle
Version: 0.8.0
Summary: A declarative DSL for high-functioning business-oriented tabular and hierarchical reporting
Home-page: https://github.com/kjosib/glowing-chainsaw
Author: Ian Kjos
Author-email: kjosib@gmail.com
License: MIT
Description: # Project Cubicle:
        The project goal is a high-level declarative domain-specific language for high-functioning, professional-looking,
        business-oriented numerical and graphical reporting, meant to interface with Python.
        
        A somewhat more [detailed introduction](docs/introduction.md) is available.
        So is a bit of history and a roadmap.
        
        ## What's working so far?
        
        Basically everything in the Minimum Viable Package at least works
        passably. However, there are a few rough edges I'd still like to
        file smooth.
        
        Start with the [chess statistics example](examples/core_chess.py) for the
        quick dunk in the deep end.
        
        There's a functioning [parser](src/cubicle/frontend.py) for a usable
        subset of the intended language. The current working version of the
        [grammar](src/cubicle/core.md) is rather terse.
        
        A [middle-end](src/cubicle/middle.py) translates from [AST](src/cubicle/AST.py)
        nodes to [static](src/cubicle/static.py) structures using a tree-walking
        approach.
        
        The [dynamic](src/cubicle/dynamic.py) sub-module may be thought of as the
        report generator back-end, but really it's the run-time support module
        for interpreting the static structures *in light of* the data that you
        feed to a particular report instance.
        
        ## What's this about then?
        Report generators are funny things. They combine data, organization, structure, calculation, and
        attractively-styled presentation. It's entirely possible to do this from first principles each time,
        perhaps atop a library like `xlsxwriter`, but when you find yourself making a stream of incremental
        changes, it's easy to get frustrated. I did. I got sick and tired of writing essentially the same
        `$deity`-forsaken program over and over again: this time with three nested loops, that time with four;
        this time with bold sums, that time with outlining; this row should show cents; that column percents.
        And then everything changes because the boss wants another column wedged into the middle. 
        
        Functional and data abstraction were not the problem here: modern scripting languages like Python
        give you plenty. Rather, it is simply the case that their syntax is a bad fit to the structure of
        the problem: everything is equally possible, but very few things are even remotely desirable.
        
        In the shower one day, I decided to build a domain-specific language for expressing all the structure,
        organization, boilerplate, and formatting of a report. And then I did some digging around.
        It turns out the world is better off if I put this code under a liberal open-source license
        and do all my development on my own time with my own resources. Who knows? Maybe it leads to something.
        
        ## If I want to play with this, what else do I need?
        
        The [booze-tools](https://github.com/kjosib/booze-tools) module converts such definitions
        to a table-driven parser. (For now, I recommend getting the version directly off GitHub,
        because this project is a sort of adolescence for that one, and the version on PyPI may
        not be in sync.)
        
        You should have some sort of business or statistical data that naturally falls
        into particular aggregations, categories, hierarchies, and the like. As a stand-in,
        I'm currently using a [chess data table on kaggle.com](https://www.kaggle.com/datasnaek/chess)
        which by permission appears at [resources](resources). It's is sort of OK, but some
        analogue of the classic "Northwind Traders" database would be a really amazing
        resource to add.
        
        ## Roadmap: What's to do next?
        
        Right now the most annoying misfeature has to do with symbolic
        range selections in the formulas that appear in the marginalia.
        I'd like to exercise greater intelligence about selecting the
        intended data range when frames are involved. In particular,
        auto-selecting the `_` field should only happen if that frame
        is in the *static* context of a formula. This is subtle.
        
        In support of charting facilities, I might begin by making sure a once
        plotted `Canvas` object can report the extent of some selection. This
        way at least other code can probe the final layout.
        
        I've an idea to make a variation on the `Tree` shape which acts as a
        proper *span* in some sort of consecutively enumerated range like months
        or weeks. The notion is that your source data might be missing some intervals
        and you still want the output report to include them all, just with zeros.
        It just needs a reasonable way to interface that requirement back to the
        application-provided "runtime environment" object.
        
        It may be worthwhile to add a charting sub-language.
        
        Then it will be time to find and add any important missing capabilities to
        the language. That would require some more real-world use cases. I need to
        harvest some good ideas from somewhere. Did I mention a copy of
        something like Northwind would be really awesome? Hey I just noticed that
        [Microsoft put it on GITHUB](https://github.com/microsoft/sql-server-samples/tree/master/samples/databases/northwind-pubs)
        with the [MIT license](https://github.com/microsoft/sql-server-samples/blob/master/license.txt)!
        I guess I'll see about porting that to SQLite.
Platform: UNKNOWN
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python :: 3
Classifier: License :: OSI Approved :: MIT License
Classifier: Operating System :: OS Independent
Classifier: Development Status :: 3 - Alpha
Classifier: Intended Audience :: Developers
Classifier: Topic :: Office/Business
Classifier: Topic :: Software Development :: Interpreters
Classifier: Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries
Requires-Python: >=3.7
Description-Content-Type: text/markdown
