openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Nicolas Bessi <nicolas.bessi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear community,

With the approaching release of V8, I'm starting to have questions about
the future of the Webkit reports.


*QWeb and Webkit*

First of all there seems to be a lot of confusions between QWeb reports and
Webkit reports.

Qweb reports and Webkit reports are separated reports engines even if they
both rely on similar concept.

They both allows you to develop at set of report using an HTML based
template language.
But they have some major differences.

AFAIK Qweb reports are view based reports that offer the same flexibility
than standards OpenERP views, (inherit, groups, xpath, translation, etc).

Webkit reports rely on an external library (wkhtmltopdf) to generate PDF
from HTML.
HTML are generated using mako/jinga templates. Webkit reports were created
to desing complex layout (like ESR payment slip) and render huge report
(thousands of pages) without needed a huge machinery.

My opinion is that both report engine are complementary at that time.


*Future of Webkit reports*

I have not heard that report_webkit will be deprecated and there are still
in code base.
Camptocamp will continue to maintain existing webkit reports (especially
financial report) but may port to Qweb report that are a better fit for
this technology (PO, SO, etc.)

We will also continue to provide enhancement and support to report_webkit
for next the release.


That said it is not impossible at middle term when we have more feedback on
Qweb report to have convergence of both engines.


Regards

Nicolas