From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2005-08-11T23:52:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby report generation tool

On Aug 11, 2005, at 9:35 AM, Berger, Daniel wrote:

> Funny you should mention it.  I've created a generic reporting  
> framework

[snip very interesting project description]

> I've set it up to do some handling of CSV files, since that's  
> mostly what we use (and
> Excel reads them fine). I've never been asked to put a report in PDF
> format, actually.  Any  reports that wanted special formatting like  
> that I would probably handle
> separately, or create a subclass that handled it.

I've done quite a bit of this kind of thing for one company I work  
for.  We CSV the data into Excel and then just hit it with formatting  
macros to pretty it up.  I've looked at using Excel's XML format in  
the past, which allows most formatting, but its lack of chart support  
(when I last checked, some time ago) was a show stopper for my company.

> Anyway, is something like that sorta what you had in mind?  I never
> released it because I kinda figured everyone liked to do reporting  
> their
> own way.  No?

I can't speak for everyone, but I do a lot of custom reporting in my  
work (which is what led me to feed Greg the hack in the first place)  
and I find your software very interesting.  I would download it and  
play with it, if released.

James Edward Gray II