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

Mark Brittingham picture Mark Brittingham · Jun 27, 2009 · Viewed 18.8k times · Source

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

nitecoder picture nitecoder · Jun 27, 2009

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.

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.