A new reporting and document production tool has been released for
Ruby called "Documatic".
Documatic is an OpenDocument processor for Ruby. It can be used to
produce attractive printable documents such as database reports,
invoices, letters, faxes and more. Both the data inputs and the
printable output are very flexible and easy to configure.
It can be used from within Ruby on Rails or from standalone Ruby
scripts.
You prepare your report templates in OpenOffice.org, entering your
Ruby code straight into the document itself. The bits of Ruby code
are marked with special styles that tell the report compiler to treat
those parts as code.
The data for your report can be anything: arrays, hashes, ActiveRecord
objects etc. etc. When the template is processed you pass in all the
values and they become available in the embedded Ruby binding.
Documatic is Free software (public domain), available as a Rubygem
from http://rubyforge.org/projects/documatic. You can install it with
the command "gem install documatic".
The Documatic homepage has more details on how to use Documatic,
including a live Rails demonstration of a Documatic report, plus a
standalone Ruby script demonstration you can download and experiment
with.
Interesting. I've been playing around with Energon which it sounds
like
is a similar tool. Have you seen it?
Thanks for the reference, Greg. I hadn't actually heard of Energon
before, but it seems quite similar, I'll give it a go.
Documatic is quite specific to OpenDocument: unlike Energon it won't
work with Word or Excel documents. But this specificity gives it some
features that (I think) are powerful: the ability to loop over table
rows and list items, partials, and direct access to the XML DOM via
REXML and XPath.
dear sender,
i�m out of the office until may 29th.
your email will not be forwarded.
for urgent stuff please contact joern@fork.de
kind regards,
alexander
Hi,
Very interesting, my designers would be glad to design reports with OO. One
issue is the lack of exporting formats (pdf, rtf, ...). I'm not an expert in
OpenDocument, but perhaps is it easily be converted ? Thus I think Documatic
would be a very interesting alternative
I'm using documatic with great success, it's a really cool aproach to
reporting. However, I have a problem with grouping and page breaks. I
have a report which renders groups of data in a table. Each group should
start on a new page. So I wrote the following inline code in my
template:
data['gruppen'].each do |pruefungs_nr, nennungen_rows|
... <table stuff here>
end
I inserted a manual page break before the end statement. This works very
well, but documatic seems to have some built in magic which eliminates
the page break if the following group fits on the same page. While I
found this very cool, my customer doesn't like it. Is there any way to
override this behaviour?
