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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: Reports & Stuff
Feed Title: Testing 1,2,3...
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I guess releasing my home grown reporting framework GRUF was a good idea after all.
Many folks have these. You know how it goes.
Boss: I need a report of X, Y, Z....today. You: Ok. What format do you want it in? Boss: Uh....as long as I can open it in Excel. You: Do you want the results archived somewhere? How far back? Boss: No. Wait, maybe for a month or so. You: Do you want an email sent out, or do you want them to just pick it up somewhere? Boss: Um...send me an email, but put it out there so that folks can grab it. Boss: Oh, can we get a web version, too? You: Sure. Boss: Keep this one handy. I might need it again.
So, then you write a one off script that grabs the data, does some basic logging, creates a csv file, and stores the csv file somewhere. At first, you hard code everything because, hey, one off script, right? Soon the boss is asking for identical or very similar reports on a regular basis. So, then you try to generalize some things so that you can handle things in a more generic fashion, but it's still clunky. Some degenerate into a big ball of mud as more and more features are requested from the boss. It's not long before you have a dozen scripts in your crontab and you're wishing you had started with some sort of framework.
This is why I wrote GRUF. I had several old Perl scripts that fell into the pattern I mentioned above. However, when I got back into the reporting business (using Ruby this time) I decided I needed a clean framework that I could use for *all* of my reporting needs. Since the release I've discovered a few minor bugs as the result of a more extensive test suite (yay testing!), and have been pushing them into CVS as I go.
So far releasing GRUF has proved to be an extremely wise decision. :)
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