= Ruby Reports 0.4.21 : The “Probably Broken” Edition =
This is the 8th release since the start of Google’s Summer of Code
== What is Ruport? ==
Ruby Reports is a library and soon-to-be framework for doing business
reporting. It provides a highly extensible formatting system, a
reporting friendly set of data structures, a very high level interface
to databases, and a common way of structuring and running your
reporting applications. It aims to integrate a number of Ruby’s best
tools so that you can easily take advantage of them.
== Project News ==
Two interesting things, incase you haven’t heard about them yet.
- We’re having a contest.
A fun day of Ruport and prizes! 2006.08.13
Please see this blog entry, even if you saw the RuportDay announcement.
http://ruport.infogami.com/blog/RuportDayDetails
- Ruport News
Dinko will now be posting periodic news issues about Ruport’s
development. These posts will be geared towards those who aren’t
interested in my blog entries that go something like (SomeClass is now
SomeOtherClass), and are interested in a high level picture of where
Ruport’s going and what’s being done along the way.
For those interested, these will be stored by category on Stone Code
Weblog
http://www.stonecode.org/blog/?cat=14
Alright, now that I’ve done my pandering, on with the release notes!
== What is new in this release? ==
This is a developmental release which removes DataSet and DataRow from
Ruport, which means the transition to our new datastructures has been
completed. This means you will be able to take advantage of the new
features such as the basic grouping stuff by default, but that we have
also almost certainly broken nearly all existing Ruport scripts, and
also probably have some bugs lurking about.
This weekend’s RuportDay contest will hopefully be a chance to really
solidify things, but be sure to report problems if you’re not planning
on participating in that contest, or if you are just nice and want us
to fix things right away. 
I’ve released some code coverage reports (a la rcov)
http://reporting.stonecode.org/coverage/, which will hopefully help
testers narrow down where to look for bugs.
Also, I have implemented the feature that was requested on RubyTalk in
the last release, to allow you to call any format ruport supports via
table.to_format_name
e.g.
table.to_csv
table.to_pdf
== Installation ==
Ruport is a gem, but if you need help with some of the dependencies
(such as DBI) or want to do a manual install, there are detailed
instructions available here: http://ruport.infogami.com/Installation
You can download it manually from Rubyforge here:
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=856
Or grab it from SVN via:
svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/ruport/tags/rel_0_4_21
== Resources ==
[1] Wiki : http://ruport.infogami.com/
[2] Atom: http://ruport.infogami.com/blog/atom.xml
[3] Mailing List:
http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org
Right now, because documentation is either outdated or transient for a
lot of the core functionality of Ruport, we encourage you to use our
more ‘interactive’ resources.
Almost all Ruport related news eventually makes it onto the wiki[1],
so it may be a good place to start. There is also an Atom Feed there
for Ruport’s blog, which might be a good way of keeping up on the
latest news[2]. We encourage people to use the wiki actively, adding
tutorials, feature requests, reporting problems, commenting on
articles, etc.
There is also the mailing list[3] which has an archive that can help
you get up to speed on Ruport or solve a quick question. This is a
very good place to start a discussion if you are working on project
you’d like to use Ruport in, are interested in contributing code, or
need to report a problem.
Finally, there is the IRC channel, which all three of Ruport’s
developers hang out on often. You can find this on freenode.
(#ruport)
There is a lot of cool new stuff in Ruport as a result of the Summer
of Code. We even have some basic functionality for you rails folks
out there. The problem is, we haven’t been very good at ensuring
things get documented, especially since things are moving so fast. So
please use these resources and let us know if you’re lost, confused,
or want to help