Rails - Jul 2005 - Can Rails produce (and possibly help design) online PDF reports?

A friend of mine and I want very much to use Rails to create reports
for a voter database for our local Democratic party.  I won''t tell you
how we''re doing them now ;-)

If we could be assured that we could generate nice-looking reports
that could be output in PDF and downloaded via a browser, then I think
we could get buy-in for a Rails project.  Wouldn''t that be cool?

The database is in MySQL.  It''s simple enough to rename tables, etc.,
to conform to the Rails naming conventions.

We need:

1. The ability to create PDF output from Rails.

2. Some way to design/specify reports so that they will look decent. 
We don''t need the ability for people to design their reports with a
browser (but we wouldn''t turn that down!).  I can imagine a number of
ways that this might work (e.g., tool produces XML, which Rails then
processes), but I''d rather find out if there are other suggestions.

I swear I''ve searched the rails mailing list archive and the web for
answers to this but found very little.

Anyone got any suggestions?  Or do we do it in Java?

Thanks,
George Entenman

On 7/26/05, George Entenman
<zabouti-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> 1. The ability to create PDF output from Rails.
> 
> 2. Some way to design/specify reports so that they will look decent.
> We don''t need the ability for people to design their reports with
a
> browser (but we wouldn''t turn that down!).  I can imagine a number
of
> ways that this might work (e.g., tool produces XML, which Rails then
> processes), but I''d rather find out if there are other
suggestions.
> 
> I swear I''ve searched the rails mailing list archive and the web
for
> answers to this but found very little.
> 
> Anyone got any suggestions?  Or do we do it in Java?
Creating PDF output isn''t really specific to Rails.  You can use FOP
to convert xsl-fo documents to PDFs.  There''s also xmlroff, but I
believe it may be missing some features that FOP has.

If you have simple requirements, you can convert HTML to PDFs using htmldoc.

There''s other document formats that can also be converted to PDFs,
such as Latex.

I have not personally used this tool, but have heard it works for simple 
PDF creation...

http://ruby-pdf.rubyforge.org/pdf-writer/manual/index.html

It''s available as a gem as well.

-Matt


James Earl wrote:
> On 7/26/05, George Entenman
<zabouti-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 
>>1. The ability to create PDF output from Rails.
>>
>>2. Some way to design/specify reports so that they will look decent.
>>We don''t need the ability for people to design their reports
with a
>>browser (but we wouldn''t turn that down!).  I can imagine a
number of
>>ways that this might work (e.g., tool produces XML, which Rails then
>>processes), but I''d rather find out if there are other
suggestions.
>>
>>I swear I''ve searched the rails mailing list archive and the
web for
>>answers to this but found very little.
>>
>>Anyone got any suggestions?  Or do we do it in Java?
> 
> 
> Creating PDF output isn''t really specific to Rails.  You can use
FOP
> to convert xsl-fo documents to PDFs.  There''s also xmlroff, but I
> believe it may be missing some features that FOP has.
> 
> If you have simple requirements, you can convert HTML to PDFs using
htmldoc.
> 
> There''s other document formats that can also be converted to PDFs,
> such as Latex.
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails

On 7/26/05, Matt Jankowski
<mjankowski-3V1LzDqIiU+4+7hldlPAjkEOCMrvLtNR@public.gmane.org>
wrote:
> I have not personally used this tool, but have heard it works for simple
> PDF creation...
> 
> http://ruby-pdf.rubyforge.org/pdf-writer/manual/index.html
> 
> It''s available as a gem as well.
Excellent link!

Thanks

On 27 Jul 2005, at 01:41, George Entenman wrote:
> I swear I''ve searched the rails mailing list archive and the web
for
> answers to this but found very little.
>
> Anyone got any suggestions?  Or do we do it in Java?
Me too, so for the future reference of others, this is how we ended  
up doing it:

1. Generate PDFs in the layout package of your choice (Illustrator/ 
Word). Makes for much easier template generation than building the  
PDF in code.
2. Convert to PDF forms using Acrobat, adding text fields,  
checkboxes, etc.
3. Generate a temporary FDF file containing the data for the report  
(couldn''t find a Ruby lib to do this, but FDF is just structured  
plain-text and hacking something together was easy)
4. Push the lot through the fantastic pdftk (http://www.pdfhacks.com/ 
pdftk/), flattening the form as you go which injects the data into  
the form fields and makes them un-editable. We also encrypt and  
compress the output PDF at this stage to prevent modification from  
within PDF editors.

Hope it helps someone,
J

On Tue, 2005-07-26 at 20:41 -0400, George Entenman
wrote:
> A friend of mine and I want very much to use Rails to create reports
> for a voter database for our local Democratic party.  I won''t tell
you
> how we''re doing them now ;-)
> 
> If we could be assured that we could generate nice-looking reports
> that could be output in PDF and downloaded via a browser, then I think
> we could get buy-in for a Rails project.  Wouldn''t that be cool?
> 
> The database is in MySQL.  It''s simple enough to rename tables,
etc.,
> to conform to the Rails naming conventions.
> 
> We need:
> 
> 1. The ability to create PDF output from Rails.
> 
Generating PDFs is quite easy:

http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2005/06/04/ruby-fpdf-on-ruby-on-rails

> 2. Some way to design/specify reports so that they will look decent. 
> We don''t need the ability for people to design their reports with
a
> browser (but we wouldn''t turn that down!).  I can imagine a number
of
> ways that this might work (e.g., tool produces XML, which Rails then
> processes), but I''d rather find out if there are other
suggestions.
> 
> I swear I''ve searched the rails mailing list archive and the web
for
> answers to this but found very little.
> 
> Anyone got any suggestions?  Or do we do it in Java?
> 
> Thanks,
> George Entenman
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails-1W37MKcQCpIf0INCOvqR/iCwEArCW2h5@public.gmane.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
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