# Ruby Reports 0.4.11

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-reports-0-4-11/96311>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [June 28, 2006, 2:41am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-reports-0-4-11/96311 "2006-06-28T02:41:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/e47774/32.png) [@naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/naething)\
**Post date:** [June 28, 2006, 2:41am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-reports-0-4-11/96311/1 "2006-06-28T02:41:28Z")

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== Ruport 0.4.11 ==  
The “Mr. Sparkle” Edition

== About ==

Ruby Reports is a software library that aims to make the task of  
reporting less tedious and painful. It provides tools for data  
acquisition, database interaction, formatting, and munging.

== Project News ==

I have three important pieces of news I’d like to share before we get  
into our release notes.

1. We’ve got a new developer!

Dudley F. has joined the project after submitting a bunch of  
really cool patches to DataSet, and will be helping out with some  
stuff on a more regular basis. Dudley has been one of the most  
active testers and contributors to Ruport, so it’s great to have him  
become a dveloper for us!

1. I’m finally writing some friendly docs!

Though you may notice that the API docs have been going down hill the  
more metaprogramming we do, I promise I’ll catch back up soon. In the  
mean time, some of the Ruport community members have been helping me  
put together a Ruport cookbook!

This will be publicly released along with Ruport 0.5.0, and will cover  
pretty much every basic use of Ruport, and some advanced ones too. If  
you are interested in a sneak peak at this cookbook, or would like to  
contribute some recipes, catch up with us on the mailing list[2], and  
we will point you in the right direction.

1. We’re now on Freenode

I’ve seen a lot of people logging in on Campfire to say hello, which  
is neat. However, you may have noticed that Dudley and I are almost  
never on there.

Though I do use campfire for SoC correspondence and other sorts of  
non-technical interaction, I usually spend most of my time lurking on  
IRC when I’m looking to do development related chat.

So please come join us in the #ruport channel on freenode. I’m almost  
always in there when I’m coding, and am happy to provide support for  
Ruport, take feature requests, chat about the software in general, and  
just have fun getting to know my users.

Until Ruport’s cookbook is done, this or the mailing list might be the  
best place to go to get some quick help.

== New in this release ==

As I near 0.5.0, which I’ve decided I wanted to treat as a somewhat  
stable milestone, I’ve been trying to clean up Ruport as much as  
possible and squash whatever bugs I can. This naturally involves  
removing deprecated methods and classes, and adding more units and  
things like that. Parser and Format::Builder are the first two  
classes to get the ugly axe in this cleanup cycle. We’ll see if any  
more are removed in the coming weeks.

The highlights of this release are that I’ve fixed a lot of subtle  
bugs in the formatting system, DataSet, and the acts\_as\_reportable  
ActiveRecord integration.

I’ve also added a method add\_columns to DataSet which now completes  
the ability to add, remove, reorder, and select subsets of columns in  
a DataSet.

The new TextPlugin implementation for tables (such as DataSets) is  
much nicer, as well. It might actually be suitable for text based  
dumping of tables to files.

I’ve also added pre/post hooks for PDF plugins.

This lets you grab the PDF::Writer object before and after a table is  
rendered on it, allowing you to add arbitrary text to your document.  
This sort of functionality will be given lots of syntactic sugar in  
the future, but for now this would allow you to do things like headers  
and footers without much effort.

== Installing Ruport ==

it’s a gem. it can also be installed via setup.rb

detailed instructions available [1]

=== SVN tag ===

svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/ruport/tags/rel\_0\_4\_11

=== Project Download Page ===

[http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group\_id=856](http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=856)

=== Resources ===

[0] [http://reporting.stonecode.org](http://reporting.stonecode.org)  
[1] [http://ruport.infogami.com/Installation](http://ruport.infogami.com/Installation)  
[2] [http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org](http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org)

Please join the mailing list and bombard me with questions,  
suggestions, and bug reports. Also feel free to contribute to the  
wiki[0]

Also, catch up with us in #ruport on freenode

=== Acknowledgements ===

David P., Dudley F. and Dinko Mehinovic for submitting  
contributions to the Ruport Cookbook.
