Ruby on Rails: What Reporting and/or Charting Tools Are Available? [closed]

Question

I'm just starting out with Ruby/Rails and am wondering what Rails developers use to provide reports and/or charts on Rails sites. In ASP.NET I use the tools from DevExpress but I don't know enough about the Rails ecosystem to know what is available. Any insight would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Well I'd say that most people write their own code to run reports from their data as it will mostly be specific to them. There are however a number of charting things that plug into a rails app quite easily.

• Open Flash Chart
• Scruffy

There is also an apress book called Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails which might be worth a look.

Good luck.

EDIT:

If you want to paginate data then will_paginate is the standard gem/plugin used by Rails developers, it's great and easy to use. For export to other formats there are several options. For PDFs there is Prawn, PDF::Writer or HTMLDOC, Prince is excellent but not free, but I think there is someone porting it to an open source library (if I remember right), and there are several libraries that can help you easily export to CSV files as well.

Answer 2

I found Gruff Graphs to be very easy to use and it produced nice-looking graphs. There is also Sparklines for tiny, tiny graphs. If it turns out you need very specific kinds of generated images, you can check out RMagick.

Answer 3

For reporting, you have

• Ruport
• Crystal Report
• Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services
• Jasper Report

For simple pre-baked reports, Ruport should be fine. But if you need to deal with high volumes of reports and large dataset, go ahead and pick one of the next three.

Note: SQL Server Reporting Services can only work with SQL Server. The others are DB-agnostic.

Answer 4

I used Open Flash Chart 2 before and it was very easy to use. You just make an array of key/value pairs and call ".to_json" on it.

Answer 5

ruby gnuplot is not exactly a charting tool.. but I have used to make some pretty complicated graphs.. and think you might like it if you need to make some quick prototypes or wish to make charts that are not intended for end-users.