[lmi] Calculation-summary omnium-gatherum

[Greg Chicares]

I found an old off-list discussion of the calculation summary, and
thought I'd better paraphrase it here so that we don't forget any
odds and ends that might be important.

One question was whether it would be okay to show the first screen
right away and render the rest in the background. Answer: Yes.
I think wxhtml does this anyway.

The maximal size of the calculation summary would be about a dozen
columns with one hundred elements each, plus a dozen or two lines
of scalar information and headings.

On 2006-9-2 1:07 UTC, Greg Chicares wrote, off the list:
|
| The most important thing is speed. It should seem instantaneous.
| Other needs or wishes in decreasing priority order:
|  - Readable display of numeric data, mostly in columns.
|  - Flexibility: users want to be able to vary which columns are
|      shown.
|  - Copyability. They'd like an easy way to copy contents to the
|      clipboard, so that they can paste it into a spreadsheet
|  - Printability. If it's easily copyable to a spreadsheet, then
|      it can be printed from the spreadsheet, and that's good
|      enough. But if there's an even easier way to print it, then
|      that's better.

"Flexibility" requires only choosing a subset of a predefined set
of available columns: it does not include defining new columns.
If we can support choosing some scalar data as well, so much the
better. I imagine that we could do all of this easily by editing
the xslt code; because that's daunting to end users, can we also
specify column selections in a simple xml file that we could more
reasonably ask them to edit? Concretely, I'm thinking of adding a
  <supplemental_report_columns>
tag to the existing 'configurable_settings.xml', whose contents
could be a whitespace-delimited set of column names.

I imagine that "Copyability" is easy. Putting tab-delimited data
on the clipboard is sufficient. I'd rather not spend time on
platform-specific enhancements like msw "OLE".

Iff it's easy, then we should undertake "Printability" as well.
We could use wxhtml's printing facility, and we could completely
ignore pagination unless that's trivial.