From: Jamey Cribbs <jcribbs@...>
Date: 2007-04-27T22:48:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Looking for thoughts and opinions on Ruport, and reporting in Ruby in general.

Lyle Johnson wrote:
> On 4/27/07, Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 5.  If you're not a user yet, what can we do to get you interested?
>
> OK, I'll bite. ;)
>
> Ruport is one of those projects that I've had on my list to look at
> one of these days. I don't think I have an immediate need for it, but
> it sounded like the kind of thing that I might need some day.
>
> So I just went to what I assume is the Ruport home page
> (http://ruport.rubyforge.org/, which redirects to
> http://stonecode.svnrepository.com/ruport/trac.cgi). Since I don't
> have any experience with Ruport, or with reporting toolsets in
> general, I immediately started looking for a tutorial or something to
> give me an idea of what this really is -- a sort of "Hello, World!"
> for Ruport.
>
> I clicked through the "Tutorials, Examples and Articles" link, and see
> tutorials for "ActsAsReportable" (which sounds Rails-oriented), a
> "Rope Cheatsheet" (and I don't yet know what Rope is) and a "Recipe
> Book". None of those sounded like what I'm looking for. I started
> going through the presentation slides found elsewhere on the page, and
> finally in the middle of the second presentation, I saw my first (and
> only) screenshots of Ruport-generated reports (yay!). But I guess what
> I would love to see on that page (or elsewhere) is a really basic,
> "Ruport in 10 minutes" kind of tutorial, with even a trivial data set,
> that walks you through the process of generating a report.
>
>

Damn!  I take off my tinfoil hat for one minute, and Lyle ends up 
reading my mind again!

I was going to post something along the same lines, but Lyle put it much 
more elegantly than I would have.

I've been meaning to check out Ruport for ages, so, prompted by 
Gregory's request, I pulled up the webpage, and ran into the same issue 
as Lyle did.

One area where I have thought of using Ruport is in a Rails app for my 
company that tracks all of our server info.  I have a "Reports" page in 
that app that allows the users to run various canned and ad-hoc reports 
against the database.  What I have done up to now is to provide the 
query result set as a csv file that they can open in Excel.

I keep waiting for someone to tell me they need their report to be 
formatted in a certain way, but, so far, everyone has been happy with 
csv files.

If there was an in-depth tutorial showing how to use Ruport in Rails 
from start to finish (i.e. query to output) that would be awesome.

I in no way want to imply anything negative about Ruport.  I appreciate 
Gregory's hard work on this project, not to mention his endurance.  
Also, I respect the fact that every post I have ever read of Gregory's 
has been very polite and respectful of our community.  I have also 
noticed that he goes out of his way to answer many newbie Ruby/Rails 
questions that have nothing to do with Ruport.

HTH,

Jamey