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.
If anyone has any comments or questions I’ll be here in this group.
Thanks for your time.
Regards,
Dave Nelson