== 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 Flanders 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!
2. 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.
3. 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
=== Resources ===
[0] http://reporting.stonecode.org
[1] http://ruport.infogami.com/Installation
[2] 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 Pollak, Dudley Flanders and Dinko Mehinovic for submitting
contributions to the Ruport Cookbook.