Kev Jackson wrote:

> So far I've only done some file munging tasks (basically using Ruby as a
> glorified sed/awk).  Looking at the last Quiz and finding ruports, and
> knowing that for a lot of the websites that we have to do here, Rails is
> perfectly adequate, the main missing piece (for basic database-backed
> websites) is for "Crystal Reports"

Yes, avoiding Crystal Reports was my motivation for starting the Ruport
project :)


> On the other hand I think it would be possible to do most of the reports
> that customers ever need with RMagick + Ruports.  Now I'm very
> inexperienced with Ruby + it's libraries, so I could be way off here,
> but would it be possile to use a dataset to create a chart?  A simple
> graph, or a pie chart I would think  would be possible.

I am not particularly familiar with RMagick, so I'm not entirely sure
how quickly this will become a feature tightly integrated into Ruport.
However, the system will always let you use whatever libraries you'd
like to get your job done, so if you can see a way of using RMagick
with a Ruport template, by all means try it out.

What I can say about Ruport is that in versions to come, it will
feature integration with PDF::Writer, which will hopefully make things
like this fairly trivial to do.  The next version of Ruport (0.2.0)
will be released from the RubyConf and will feature a lot of cleanup
and internal reworking.  The version following that will focus on the
integration of Ruport with other tools, to include PDF::Writer for
output, automatic CSV generation, possibly a way to output Excel's XML
format, and other formatting goodies.  Ruport 0.3.0 will also implement
methods to make use of James Edward Gray II's chainsaw data munging
tool Parse/Input.

So can Ruport eventually meet your reporting needs?  Well, I hope so :)
If you do end up implementing some RMagick tools that can be
generalized and integrated into the Ruport core, that would be great.

Right now, Ruport is under very active development (It's my day job
actually, when I'm not in school), and is basically alpha software.

Ruport 0.2.0 is going to be somewhat less fragile, and I'm using it in
work presently, but 0.3.0 will be where the cool features start to come
in. :)