Looking for some thoughts and opinions (short survey)
Gregory Brown
I posted this on RubyTalk to get some feedback from the general Ruby
crowd, but I'll repost it here for thoughts.
I'll send a summary of the RubyTalk thread when it dies out, too.
===================================================
I announced Ruport 1.0 RC1 a few days ago, and a few folks here on
RubyTalk were really helpful about pointing out some issues.
Since we've only got a few weeks left before our scheduled 'real'
release of 1.0, I'd like to get a bit of the RubyTalk effect on a few
questions. I'll try to keep my pandering down to release
announcements and this thread, but I really value the input from this
list, which is why I'm asking. :)
Feel free to answer whatever questions you want from the below, I'm
also more than happy to just start a general discussion here about the
topic of writing reporting software in Ruby, as I think it's *still* a
hard domain to tackle...
questions follow:
1. If you've used Ruport before, what version(s), and what was your
experience with the software (good or bad).
2. If you've not used Ruport before, but know about it and have a
reason for not using it, what is that reason?
3. If you didn't know about it before, but have reporting needs, what
are those needs?
(I can help tell you if Ruport is a good fit)
4. If you're a regular user, what have been the biggest pain points
for you working with our software? What about the best stuff?
5. If you're not a user yet, what can we do to get you interested?
(Besides turn it into a video game or pay you in large bags of money.
:) )
6. Anything on your wishlist for reporting related Ruby stuff?
7. Last year we did something called RuportDay, which is like
RailsDay but with smaller prizes and less fun. :) It was actually a
pretty interesting and productive day where devs and contributors and
users could get together and hack / chat. We also did offer some
small cash prizes. If we were able to organize this again this year,
sometime shortly before or after 1.0, would you be interested in
participating?
8. From a community-involvement perspective, any criticisms or praises
regarding Ruport?
Chris Johnson
My (brief) comments are inline.
> 1. If you've used Ruport before, what version(s), and what was your
> experience with the software (good or bad).
>
>
> 2. If you've not used Ruport before, but know about it and have a
> reason for not using it, what is that reason?
I am in the midst of a large enterprise implementation right now, and
need a reporting solution BADLY. My perfect fit (functionally
speaking) would be MS Reporting Services. I need the ability to
quickly write a lot of reports and then integrate them with my app.
Even nicer wold be the ability for an end user to build ad-hoc
reports.
I'm currently using PDF::Writer to build the 2-3 reports we currently
have (including a PO). It works well, but takes loger than I'd like;
handcoding every report is really not what I'd expect at the
enterprise level.
> 3. If you didn't know about it before, but have reporting needs, what
> are those needs? (I can help tell you if Ruport is a good fit)
>
> 4. If you're a regular user, what have been the biggest pain points
> for you working with our software? What about the best stuff?
>
> 5. If you're not a user yet, what can we do to get you interested?
> (Besides turn it into a video game or pay you in large bags of money.
> :) )
>
> 6. Anything on your wishlist for reporting related Ruby stuff?
>
> 7. Last year we did something called RuportDay, which is like
> RailsDay but with smaller prizes and less fun. :) It was actually a
> pretty interesting and productive day where devs and contributors and
> users could get together and hack / chat. We also did offer some
> small cash prizes. If we were able to organize this again this year,
> sometime shortly before or after 1.0, would you be interested in
> participating?
>
> 8. From a community-involvement perspective, any criticisms or praises
> regarding Ruport?
>
I hope this helps.
--
Best Regards,
Chris
Michael Milner
Thanks for the response. All the input we can get right now will help us both in completing the 1.0 release and in planning for future work.
Hi Greg,
My (brief) comments are inline.
I am in the midst of a large enterprise implementation right now, and
need a reporting solution BADLY. My perfect fit (functionally
speaking) would be MS Reporting Services. I need the ability to
quickly write a lot of reports and then integrate them with my app.
Even nicer wold be the ability for an end user to build ad-hoc
reports.
Well, we don't have anything out of the box that gives you the kind of thing you'd find with MS Reporting Services, like a visual report designer, that kind of thing. Do you have any examples of what you'd like to see Ruport do? I was thinking that if you had a specific example, I'd be glad to help you build it up in Ruport and maybe that would help solidify ideas on where we could do things better, what's missing, etc.
I'm currently using PDF::Writer to build the 2-3 reports we currently
have (including a PO). It works well, but takes loger than I'd like;
handcoding every report is really not what I'd expect at the
enterprise level.
We do have a number of helpers that should make working with pdf documents much easier. We also find it cumbersome to work directly with PDF::Writer, so we've tried to give you some higher level methods to help with the formatting. Here's a list of some of the methods we have available. I'd be glad to help you incorporate these into your project also.
* @add_text@ - adds text to your output
* @center_image_in_box@ - takes a path to an image file and centers it
within boundaries you specify
* @rounded_text_box@ - draw text surrounded by a rounded-corner box
* @watermark@ - places a centered watermark on each page of your report
* @move_cursor@ - moves cursor specified number of units along the y-axis
* @move_cursor_to@ - moves cursor to a specified location on the y-axis
* @pad@ - adds a specified amount of space above and below some output
* @pad_top@ - adds a specified amount of space above some output
* @pad_bottom@ - adds a specified amount of space below some output
* @draw_table@ - uses PDF::SimpleTable to draw a table to output
* @horizontal_line@ - draw a horizontal line
* @vertical_line@ - draw a vertical line
* @left_boundary@ - get the left boundary of the page
* @right_boundary@ - get the right boundary of the page
* @top_boundary@ - get the top boundary of the page
* @bottom_boundary@ - get the bottom boundary of the page
* @cursor@ - get the current location of the cursor on the y-axis
* @draw_text@ - places text at a specified position on the page
Gregory Brown
On Apr 27, 10:04 am, "Gregory Brown" <gregory.t.br...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I posted this on RubyTalk to get some feedback from the general Ruby
> crowd, but I'll repost it here for thoughts.
>
> I'll send a summary of the RubyTalk thread when it dies out, too.
Here are some key points from the RubyTalk thread:
1. Folks wanted a new user oriented "Ruport in 10 minutes" tutorial.
I produced one, but I'd like some feedback on how to make it better:
http://rubyreports.org/docs/ruport-in-10.pdf
2. People still want to create some sort of Report dashboard.
I still don't know how to make this palatable for people because I'm
not doing rails dev day to day.
I would love to see some of our users band together and build this
though, I'd support them however I could.
3. PDF difficulties came up, outputting TeX was suggested, RFPDF was
mentioned, as was Tioga:
http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/~paxton/tioga.html
They all have their merits, however, we still haven't found a better
solution than PDF::Writer for core support.
4. People pointed out that we don't really have a solid way of
defining the report process itself.
Donald Ball, Jr. Writes:
"I've looked at Ruport before but as far as I can tell, it doesn't
really
try to solve the part of the problem I'm most interested in. Ruport
seems to tackle pulling data from a variety of sources in a unified
way,
and rendering the output to a variety of formats, but doesn't provide
any help for modelling the reports themselves.
Maybe some concrete examples might help clarify what I'm driving at.
I've writing an interactive system for generating reports on a variety
of different library things - circulation activity, public computer
use,
etc. The range of the reports is user-defined - this month, the
previous
quarter, etc. The domain (?) of the reports is as well - maybe
system-wide, maybe by region, or by branch, or by individual terminal
or
computer. For graphs, the variable in question, etc."
He's right, of course. This issue of defining process has come up
before,
and I think what we've said about is unlike some things, we don't
think this
issue is beyond our scope. It's really just that none of our
developers
(especially me) have come up with a smart syntax for doing this
(even an imaginary one).
If anyone has ideas on this, we're interested.
5. People are still afraid by the lack of documentation...
And we're still working on it. :)