[ANN] Ruport 0.2.5: Enumerable DataSets, and things that go bump in the night

[Gregory Brown]

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.=20
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:ataSet and Report:ataRows as these sort of pseudo
Enumerable messes. No more!

now:

query "SELECT * FROM FOO" do |data|
@report =3D 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#s=
elect
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=

 

[swille]

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.

Have you seen IBM's Directory Integrator at all? It's sort of a any
format to any format tool which is quite useful. It's used a lot to
pull stuff out of a database, save it to a csv, then input it to a
LDAP directory, etc. It strikes me that this seems as if it could
have a similar scope. Cool stuff.

 

[Gregory Brown]

Have you seen IBM's Directory Integrator at all? It's sort of a any
format to any format tool which is quite useful. It's used a lot to
pull stuff out of a database, save it to a csv, then input it to a
LDAP directory, etc. It strikes me that this seems as if it could
have a similar scope. Cool stuff.

I haven't seen that, but yes, the number one goal of Ruport is to act
as a bridge between various databases and data sources as well as many
different output formats.

The main idea is that Ruport will make it so similar but incompatible
systems will be able to talk, without pain. This way, you can focus
on the reporting, not the bridgework.

Thanks for pointing this out, I'll look into it

 

[Tom Agnew]

Consider the functionality of Jasper Reports - it's a java-based,
industrial strength open-source report writer. Replicating these
features in Ruby, with YAML specs instead of XML, would be a killer app!!!

Check it out... http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/

Tom

 

[Gregory Brown]

Consider the functionality of Jasper Reports - it's a java-based,
industrial strength open-source report writer. Replicating these
features in Ruby, with YAML specs instead of XML, would be a killer app!!= !

Check it out... http://jasperreports.sourceforge.net/

With all these great libraries to steal from, Ruport should be on top
in no time!

Seriously though, that looks interesting, thanks for the link.

To anyone who's offered suggestions, I greatly appreciate them, and
have tucked them in a special place within my heart.

As soon as I burn through the rather massive TODO list Ruport is
accumulating, I will definitely do a 'best of' pruning of other
libraries