Jack, I'm afraid that for all practical purposes, Ruport is simply an illusion. I've approached their forum with pleas for help and been reprimanded for doing so. I've scoured the web and cannot find any training documentation, nor is this product mentioned in any Rails books. They have no practical examples and I must assume the only people who use this are into decyphering code. If you do hear of a (learnable) reporting strategy I would be grateful to hear your findings. David
Hi, Coming from the java world, my bigger problem to turn to RoR technology was the reporting part. Is there a real reporting solution in the RoR world? I don't think so. I solved my problem by looking to java solutions, those I knew good, stable and pro. My final solution is a bridge to a JasperReports engine. Works like a charm. My 2 cents. Richard
Actually, you approached our mailing list with a request for a Rails consultant to help you with a query. You might find such a person on our list, but a much better place to ask questions like that are lists that are Rails specific.
http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-reports/browse_thread/thread/e133a153f5908861
Then, you decided that we were unwilling to help without asking anything about Ruport, and moved along to post rudely about us elsewhere
http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-reports/browse_thread/thread/1dad0006c8b0a14c
It's true that there isn't much Rails documentation on Ruport because Ruport is first and foremost a Ruby library. We're working on some rails centric examples, in the mean time, there are several active record based examples distributed with the source that might be helpful to folks here:
There is also a basic examples page on our website, which admittedly is brand new, due to the recent 1.0 release:
http://rubyreports.org/examples.html
We also have a few tutorials available:
http://stonecode.svnrepository.com/ruport/trac.cgi/wiki/TutorialsAndArticles
Finally, you can find our (almost fully documented) API at:
Despite Dave's feelings on this, our list has actually the opposite reputation. We welcome people to come and ask all sorts of questions, and we routinely help people get stuff running on Rails. The documentation is not quite as good as it should be, but this is largely due to a fast moving target developed by volunteers (The same issue as any other free software project).
We'd love to get more insight from our Rails users, and if anyone would like to help contribute doc patches or tutorials, that'd be great. The list archive is also a great place to search for rails related info on ruport.
-greg
Hi Fred. It's true Ruby has nothing comprehensive like JasperReports. Ruport is more aiming for people who want to build custom reporting applications from the ground up. I've heard good things about but not yet tried out ActiveWarehouse, I'm not sure if that would solve some of the more rails-centric problems we're not tackling in Ruport.
I'm interested in the JasperReports bridge idea though, some folks have expressed interest in getting that kind of integration with Ruport, and I'm open to the idea. Is there an open source bridge available? If so, I'd like to look at it and see if there are good ways to utilize it.
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
Ruport is great. I wish it was around when we first starting writing reports. We only have a need for PDF report, so we use Austin Ziegler's fantastic pdf library here: http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-pdf/
I've been very very pleasantly suprised with the performance Austin has squeezed out of that library...
I believe Ruport uses it and other libraries as well... As always it depends on your needs...Ruport can handle the common cases pretty well IMO.
If you are looking for a gui tool like crystal reports or something, I
couldn't find much a year ago. I don't like them anyway but some
people do. 
Then, you decided that we were unwilling to help without asking anything about Ruport, and moved along to post rudely about us elsewhere
http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-reports/browse_thread/thread/1dad…
Hear hear.
BraveDave treated Goldberg similarly when he approached our community for help, but for some reason left disappointed. He took a swipe at us in another thread:
In my observation Greg and the Ruport community are very courteous and helpful.
Back on topic: I'm from the competition (friendly competition, I hope). My new project "Documatic" is a report generator that uses OpenDocument as its format. It's another alternative you might consider.
Regards, Dave Nelson
Ruport is great. I wish it was around when we first starting writing reports.
Thanks Dan!
We only have a need for PDF report, so we use Austin Ziegler's fantastic pdf library here:http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-pdf/
I've been very very pleasantly suprised with the performance Austin has squeezed out of that library...
I believe Ruport uses it and other libraries as well...
We sure do, it's the most comprehensive pure Ruby PDF lib out there, even with its warts.
Recently, we've been recommending that people subclass a Ruport PDF formatter and use our pdf_writer_proxy mainly because we fix several bugs in PDF::Writer, including the massive memory consumption issue with Simple Tables and several other issues as well. This also as a side effect gives you the helpers we've added as well.
http://stonecode.svnrepository.com/ruport/trac.cgi/wiki/PdfProxy
We're working on patching back to PDF::Writer now. Austin hasn't had the time to maintain it (even though most of the patches in Ruport were provided by him!), but he is getting a branch set up where one of our contributors can start fixing the bugs we fix in Ruport, and possibly bringing some of the helpers back upstream.
As always it depends on your needs...Ruport can handle the common cases pretty well IMO.
Yeah, it's definitely a situation with Ruport in which you're going to win if either
a) you have a super common report you want to build
or
b) you want to build your own reporting system from the ground up, but want unified support for all the supporting libs and a consistent interface
What I'm hoping is that folks will start contributing higher level tools to ruport-util that solve specific needs. That package already includes invoice support, and we're working on things like PDF forms and possibly labels and things like that, and I'm hoping as people play around with Ruport and build useful things, that they'll be willing to patch back or at least release gem_plugins...
If you are looking for a gui tool like crystal reports or something, I couldn't find much a year ago. I don't like them anyway but some people do.
As far as I know, this is still the case. The only mature project like this is now in Java / JRuby and I think it has stagnated. (DataVision)
I've been working on the energon code trying to port it to Ruport under the hood. It was my original hope that tools like this would be built using Ruport, not a part of Ruport itself. I am definitely going to dig around in documatic, and possibly send you some ideas and patches if it's cleaner under the hood than I found energon to be. This doc substitution idea seems like a great one to me...
Hi Greg,
built using Ruport, not a part of Ruport itself. I am definitely going to dig around in documatic, and possibly send you some ideas and
That would be most welcome, thank you very much.
patches if it's cleaner under the hood than I found energon to be.
*Fingers collar nervously.* The compiler code is a horror of regular expressions, I'm afraid. I hope that doesn't put you off. But any suggestions for clarification and improvement would also be welcome.
This doc substitution idea seems like a great one to me...
I took that approach because I don't like using builder-style
solutions for visual, printable output. It takes too much time to
fiddle everything into the right shape. I think using a graphical
user interface (OpenOffice.org) for the visual aspects, and using code
for the data aspects is the perfect mix... at least for me.
Regards, Dave
This might give me a good enough use case to build the Ruport plugin I've been meaning to for JEG2's yet to be released GhostWheel packrat parser.
I need to see how things go in the next few days, I'm trying to keep myself away from coding for at least a little while, considering all the work that went into Ruport 1.0. If you don't hear from me in a week or so, send me a mail and remind me, because I know I'll need something like this at work soon.
I'm sorry, bridge is not the correct word, interface would be more relevant. Actually I followed the following process : http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoIntegrateJasperReports
Interesting. I'll need to look a little deeper into this, though I'm not sure at a quick glance where it'd fit into Ruport. If anyone has any good ideas about this down the line, please come share them on our mailing list.
-greg
Hi,
Despite Dave's feelings on this, our list has actually the opposite reputation. We welcome people to come and ask all sorts of questions, and we routinely help people get stuff running on Rails.
This is so true. I came there a few weeks ago and was completly lost using ruport for generating some basic pdf output in my rails application. The list, and especially Gregory, were extremly helpful. By now I'm using ruport to create a few very simple pdf reports in my app.
Regards, Timo
Another option for report generation is to outsource the problem.
I've been doing a bit of work extracting records into Adobe XFDF format using builder. This allows you to create a Form PDF in OpenOffice (or even Acrobat if you're into buying software). You then store the template Form PDF on a web server somewhere (Amazon S3 is as good a place as any), and send back an XFDF file containing a web reference to the PDF template.
On the client the web browser will launch Acrobat Reader and it will then automatically merge the data with the template and you have your report.
That way I can give the report layout to the designers and they can get all arty in QuarkExpress or whatever it is they use.
The main issue is making sure that the client has Acrobat integration set up correctly in their browsers.
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
Another interesting alternative... but you are still stuck with the pdf format. I like the JasperReports approach, one template -> engine-managed generation in multi export formats (pdf, rtf, excel, ...)
