From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2007-04-27T22:59:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Looking for thoughts and opinions on Ruport, and reporting in Ruby in general.

On 4/27/07, Jamey Cribbs <jcribbs@netpromi.com> wrote:

> 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.

The webpage is worse-off-then-ever.  We deleted everything that isn't
directly relevant to the latest released code over last weekend.
We're in the progress of putting this all back together, just as soon
as the API is redocumented, which is what I'll be spending my day on
today.

> 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.

This does often seem to be the case.  Usually when that fails, I
change one word in my Ruport code to switch to HTML.   If that doesn't
work, I switch to PDF but then I don't have CSS so I need to roll up
my sleeves a bit.  (Getting Much Better though!)

> 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 have a bunch of acts_as_reportable code starting to accumulate.  The
trouble here is that I don't really do any Rails at all, just a fair
bit of camping and standalone ActiveRecord.  Mike Milner, our other
lead dev, is a Rails programmer but hasn't quite dug deep into
integrating Ruport into his app yet.

Would camping examples be helpful to Rails users?  I imagine they
wouldn't be terribly hard to port over, as the Ruport  code and the
ActiveRecord code and anything hinging on ActiveSupport would be the
same.   If that's the case, I'll try to get some stuff out there.

> 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.

Thank you for the kind words.   We've had a lot of help, especially
from the other devs on the project, and recently very much from Mike.
 However, it is a long, hard, project, so I really appreciate the
compliments.

As far as endurance goes.... we see a light at the end of the tunnel,
just hoping it's not a train. :)

warm regards,
-greg