Daily

This Rails 3.1 application is about keeping reports on your application up to date without overloading your database.

Execute and SQL query every hour and optionally run some code to transform it a bit
People can create reports in various formats (csv, json, pdf, etc) from that with another optional transform
These reports are saved at a public (albeit crazy-long) URL for linking from dashboards or your application

By doing this caching and running against a read-only database, it will reduce the load on the database as compared to application report generators or giving lots of people SQL access.

The code leverages the Ruport library wherever possible.

Setup

Server installations needed:

rvm
some rvm ruby (ree)

To deploy the app, I'm using the copy capistrano method to prevent github keys being needed.

bundle exec cap production deploy:setup

Then, I put my version of daily.yml in the /app/path/shared directory.

bundle exec cap production deploy:cold
bundle exec cap production deploy:migrations
bundle exec cap production seed:admin

Which makes the first user

email: [email protected]
password: changeme

TODO

Variable report refresh cycle (minutes, hours, days)
Allow JSON inputs into report formatters
Make more report formatters
Make more transforms
Cache the table data (also on a variable schedule)