Welcome to the release of Ruport 0.2.5:
The “I’m releasing too often” edition.
What is Ruport?
Right now, Ruport is alpha software, but it is already useful. It is
both a report generation and formatting framework AND a reporting
library that aims to make talking to database FOO and
outputting in format BAR trivial. You can even talk to things that
aren’t databases, like CSV files. You have a choice of using the
ruport application to automate a lot of your work, or using the
library to implement your own application based on it. That part is
up to you.
Ruport currently can take a query and talk to any Database DBI
supports, and return you a DataSet, which can do neat things, like
easily output a CSV or an HTML table and even email them trivially.
This functionality will be expanded greatly in coming releases.
Who is this new rcanieso guy?
I’m no longer all out on my lonesome with Ruport.
Say hello to Robert Canieso, our new maintainer
of the Ruport::Format module.
About 0.2.5
Well folks, the new stuff here is actually quite useful, despite the
fact that I have not yet updated the ruport-example package to show
off the shiny new features. In previous versions, I was using
Report::DataSet and Report::DataRows as these sort of pseudo
Enumerable messes. No more!
now:
query “SELECT * FROM FOO” do |data|
@report = data.map { |row| row[“name”] } .join(" | ")
end
will work just fine! This again, goes in the category of I should
have read the modules chapter of the pickaxe earlier.
Unfortunately, for those who were using the more low level
Report::Engine#select
or Report::Engine#execute which returned DBI::Row objects… this
feature has gone away in Ruport 0.2.5
Report::Engine#query is now your one stop shop, and it will continue
to be improved in newer releases.
We’ve also begun work on Ruport::Format and now support html and csv
output.
See the CHANGELOG for the rest.
Where do I get it?
Ruport is a gem.
on most *nix, it’s probably just:
sudo gem install ruport
on windows, it’s probably:
gem install ruport
You can also rake your own gem, or work directly with the source by
downloading one of the packaged releases (available as zip, gzip,
bzip2, gem):
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=856&release_id=3543
How do I use this thing?!?
If you want to use the ruport executable, first start by typing:
ruport generate my_project_name
to create a little directory structure to work on. Then edit
config/ruport.yaml
and populate it with DB / Email info. Then start writing your
templates.
Oh… don’t know how to do that? There is a set of examples at:
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=856&release_id=3481
which you can just unzip and then follow the PDF walkthrough.
Two Caveats:
-
The new features in 0.2.5 are not in this walkthrough yet, I will
release ruport-example 0.2.4 some time this week. -
There has been some concern about the artwork on the front page of
the manual. It was the result of me searching wikipedia for stove
when looking for suitable “cookbook” artwork.
But the confusion it is causing will have it removed from the next
version of the walkthrough, possibly replaced with a nice big slab of
chunky bacon
You can also use the API documentation (which is not illustrated and
sadly patchy in parts)
http://ruport.rubyforge.org/docs/
Or read the source directly.
Or email me on or off list, because I need the feedback!
Minor Complaint:
the 1.8.3 / 1.8.4pre1 bug with RubyGems / RubyForge is a nightmare!
I had to rebuild everything… and then I had to update version
numbers…
and whine and cry about it. Please release the fix to the public as
soon as you can!
-Greg
