Ruby on Rails: What Reporting and/or Charting Tool

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

Hi guys I have been working on a reporting tool, a ruby gem. Please have a look and suggest me if you have some features in mind. I am already using it in 2 of my projects. http://ashrafuzzaman.github.io/query_report/

Answer 2

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 3

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 4

It's not rails specific, but Google Visualization API is pretty cool.

Emprise also has some pretty nice looking graphs.

Answer 5

The Ext Javascript library has just released (as of v3.0) a new set of tools to generate Adobe Flash charts and graphs, just by programming in Javascript! It is all client-side, so you can use it with any backend webserver (Rails, PHP, ASP.NET, etc.)

Check out examples here:

ExtJS Flash Charting Examples

It is powerful and looks great. The nice thing is that since it is Javascript, you can create form fields that, once filled out, regenerate the graph using JSON/XML data from the server using the new data that the user just typed! It's pretty nifty.

Answer 6

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.