From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2007-04-28T05:38:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Looking for thoughts and opinions on Ruport, and reporting in Ruby in general.

On 4/27/07, Ball, Donald A Jr (Library) <donald.ball@nashville.gov> wrote:
> (apologies for the resend, my subject was mysteriously stripped from my
> first reply)
>
> I've looked at Ruport before but as far as I can tell, it doesn't really
> try to solve the part of the problem I'm most interested in. Ruport
> seems to tackle pulling data from a variety of sources in a unified way,
> and rendering the output to a variety of formats, but doesn't provide
> any help for modelling the reports themselves.

This is a real pain point for us for sure.  We're looking at our
Report class and seriously considering dropping it before 1.0, if we
can't think of a way to make it fairly elegant.

> Maybe some concrete examples might help clarify what I'm driving at.
> I've writing an interactive system for generating reports on a variety
> of different library things - circulation activity, public computer use,
> etc. The range of the reports is user-defined - this month, the previous
> quarter, etc. The domain (?) of the reports is as well - maybe
> system-wide, maybe by region, or by branch, or by individual terminal or
> computer. For graphs, the variable in question, etc.

So what we really need is a way for you to define a bunch of variable
featuresets, and then hook those up to the right data manipulations
and renderers, more or less.

I've been asking folks on the Ruport list for a syntax (even
imaginary, so long as it's valid ruby) for doing this in a general
way, and I've unfortunately yet to see anything.  Maybe folks on this
list will have some insight.

I tend to use camping as the primary platform for my Ruport work, so I
do all of my process definition in the controllers and helpers.   In
command line reports, I do similar, but it's a fair bit of Ruby and
little help from Ruport.

I want to make this better, but I need some concrete ideas for what
the interface would look like, because I'm yet to think of a good one
(after way too long)