TFORMer 5.0.0 released

Besides developing OpenSourceSoftware I do also work for TEC-IT Datenverarbeitung GmbH. Last week we finally released TFORMer 5.0.0. A cross platform, easy to use and very powerful report printing framework.


I worked over the last 3 years on this version and we all put a lot of work into this release. Most importantly, the source is completely portable over a broad range of platforms and architectures. The Linux version is relased for several RPM based distributions and as deb for Ubuntu. AIX, HPUX and Solaris builds are available on request. Please note that the same source is also compiled on Windows (from which we ported it to all these platforms).


TFORMer can print to PDF, PostScript and HTML files and of course to any system printer using CUPS. More output formats will be available with TFORMer 5.1 :) The PDF and PostScript output are really highquality and were the two projects you got me to learn both output formats.


I am proud of the quality of the Linux version. We ship with an easy to use installer, which installs either an RPM or a DEB. The software is installed, with documentation (PDF format and man page), several templates, demo reports, sample code for C and .Net and of course development libraries for C and C#. After the software has been installed and report is printed automatically (if the users agrees to do so) and everything works - I can't imagine reporting has ever been easier on Linux.


The C API is great and powerful, but the new .Net API is sexy! First of all, the wrapper is portable between Mono on Linux and .Net on Windows. We load the TFORMer.dll when run on Windows and we load libTFORMer.so on Linux when we are executed on Unix.


Have you ever created a PDF report so easy?

  // Create a TFORMer Job
  Job job = new Job();

  // Load a predefined form layout
  job.RepositoryName = "MyForm.tff"M

  // create an in-memory data-source
  DataSourceRecordSet datasource = new DataSourceRecordSet();

  // Set some datafields
  job.DataSource = datasource;
  Record record = new Record();
  record.Data.Add("Email", "support@tec-it.com");
  record.Data.Add("JobTitle", "Support Engineer");
  record.Data.Add("Name", "Mr. Harald Backoffice");
  datasource.Records.Add(record);

  // Set the output file name and type
  job.OutputName = "out.pdf";
  job.PrinterType = PrinterType.PdfFile;

  // Print 
  job.Print();

Easy - Ja??!


A free demo version is available (for Windows and several Linux versions). So give it a try.