Reporting and rapid CRUD with Rails

[bjhess]

Good afternoon (CST, anyway),

I’m researching a rapid development tool for an insurance company. The
tool would be used for small data stores with very, very few users.
This problem is not in the realm of enterprise application development.

I really like how quickly RoR apps can be created for basic CRUD
functionality. However, one of the big features required here is a
reporting solution that is quick and easy for the business. So a quick
CRUD app could be built in RoR, but then how do we implement quick and
painless reporting on the data? We would like to avoid mounds and
mounds of custom code.

Just wondering if anything out there “snaps in” to RoR or if I need to
be looking elsewhere. (Feel free to recommend where you think
“elsewhere” is, too.) I’d like to do something with RoR because I
think the framework could grow into more extensive use within the
company in the future.

Thanks!

[bjhess]

bjhess wrote:

painless reporting on the data? We would like to avoid mounds and
mounds of custom code.

Just wondering if anything out there “snaps in” to RoR or if I need to
be looking elsewhere. (Feel free to recommend where you think
“elsewhere” is, too.) I’d like to do something with RoR because I
think the framework could grow into more extensive use within the
company in the future.

One way I implemented a fairly painless ad-hoc reporting for one of my
rails apps was to create a view that has a bunch of fields/select boxes
on it, one for each table column. The user simply clicks on each select
option they want, enters freeform text into any text field, then clicks
“submit”, behind the scenes in the controller, I build up a query string
from all of the form fields, do the query, and return the results as a
csv file.

The user can then save the csv file (or immediately open it in Excel)
and they pretty much have a custom report ready to go.

So far, it’s worked well and it took a lot less time than having to
build some custom report writer for them that spits out pdf files.

Jamey

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[bjhess]

You might be interested in the ActiveWarehouse plugin. It provides a
means for building drill-down reports on top of a multi-dimensional
data warehouse. It may be beyond your needs but feel free to take a
look and borrow what code you need (it’s open source). Also feel free
to send me any questions or join the mailing list to contribute
feedback.

http://activewarehouse.rubyforge.org/

Sincerely,
Anthony E.

On 11/13/06, bjhess [email protected] wrote:

CRUD app could be built in RoR, but then how do we implement quick and

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Email: [email protected]
Cell: 808 782-5046
Current Location: Melbourne, FL

[bjhess]

Thanks for the responses, everyone.

Jamey, that gives me an idea that maybe we could create a generator for
a “report generating” page. This page could be generated into any app
and it would load up check boxes for each column grouped under table
name headings. Hopefully it would be dynamic as the database changed
over time.

Couple that with ruport and we might have a pretty functional system
that requires little work to get up-and-running.

Anthony, ActiveWarehouse sounds interesting, though it isn’t
necessarily what we’re going for in this instance. I’ll keep that in
my back pocket, however.