I’m currently working on a Rails project that needs to generate Report PDFs. Ruport, of course, is an obvious choice for this task. It took me a little bit to get used to how Ruport does things (read: wants you to do things). I don’t want to dive too deep into getting started with Ruport. If you’re new to it, check out these two great guides: The Dimwit’s Guide and O’Reilly Network Ruport Guide. Please note, however, that the tutorials and guides often mention “Renderers”: they are called “Controllers” in the current version of Ruport. Just keep that in mind. So back to my PDF columns problem: I wanted to be able to have all the text in the first column left-aligned and the text in all the other columns right-aligned. This turned out to be a little harder than I thought. Let’s do this step by step (I assume you have installed the Ruport Gem and it’s dependencies). This will also show you how to use Ruport in your Rails app without acts_as_reportable:

1. Create a "reports" directory inside your app directory.
2. Add it to your Rails load path by adding this inside the Rails::Initializer.run block in your environment.rb:

   config.load_paths += %W( #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/reports )

3. For the next step, we assume to have class that looks something like this:

   class MyReport < ActiveRecord::Base
     validates_presence_of :report_title, :report_subtitle
   ColumnHeader has an attribute “name”
   has_many :column_headers
   We assume they come in the right order, and a row has_many columns.
   A Column has an attribute “value”
   has_many :rows
   end
   

   So we see our report can have n rows with n columns and two attributes: "report_title" and "report_subtitle".
4. Create a file called "my_report_renderer.rb" in your app/reports directory.
5. Put this in the file:

   require 'ruport'
   class MyReportRenderer < Ruport::Controller
   stage :report_header, :report_body
   finalize :report
   class PDF < Ruport::Formatter::PDF
   renders :pdf, :for => MyReportRenderer
   def build_report_header
     # data is an instance of your MyReport class
     add_text "My Great Report", :font_size =&gt; 20,
             :justification =&gt; :center
     add_text data.report_title, :font_size =&gt; 18
     add_text data.report_subtitle, :font_size =&gt; 16
   end
   
   def build_report_body
     # we have to build the table
     headers = []
   
   
     # gather the column header strings in an array
     data.column_headers.each do |ch|
       headers &lt;&lt; ch.name
     end
   
   
     table = Table(headers) do |t|
       data.rows.each do |row|
         columns = []
   
         # gather the actual column values for each row in an array
         row.columns.each do |col|
           columns &lt;&lt; col.value
         end
   
         # add the columns for the current row to the table
         t &lt;&lt; columns
       end
     end
   
     # create column option that right justify all columns but the first one
     col_opts = {}
     header_index = 0
     for header_index in (0..(headers.length - 1))
       # we'll skip the first one, since :left is the default
       if header_index != 0
         # the options for each column are indexed by it's name (headers array)
         col_opts[headers[header_index]] = {:justification =&gt; :right}
       end
     end
   
     pad (20) { draw_table(table, :column_options =&gt; col_opts) }
   end
   
   def finalize_report
     render_pdf
   end
   end
   end

   OK, now we have a renderer (or controller) that renders our report with all columns right-justified except for the first one.
6. Now just add an action to your MyReport Rails controller:

   def download_pdf
   begin
   @report = MyReport.find(params[:id])
   send_data(MyReportRenderer.render(:pdf, :data => @report),
   :filename => “report#{params[:id]}.pdf”,
   :type => “application/pdf”,
   :disposition => ‘inline’)
   rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
   flash[:error] = “Report not found.”
   redirect_to :action => :index
   end
   end

7. That’s it.

If this was useful for you, please take a minute and recommend me: Thank you!