acts_as_reportable in 30 seconds or your money back

acts_as_reportable is an ActiveRecord extension that allows you to convert a query on an ActiveRecord model object into a Ruport::Data::Table for easy integration with Ruport's formatting capabilities.

To use AAR, install Acts as Reportable

In your model class, you can call the acts_as_reportable class method to bless your model class with the report_table method. This is where the magic happens. report_table creates a Ruport::Data::Table from an ActiveRecord find.

Here's a little example borrowed from the acts_as_reportable source.

Given these model classes:

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_reportable
  belongs_to :author

  def author_name
    author.name
  end
end

class Author < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_reportable
  has_many :books
end

You can call:

>> puts Book.report_table(:all).as(:csv)
id,title,author_id
1,Whys (Poignant) Guide to Ruby,1
2,"Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said",2
3,Farenheit 451,3

As you can see, this gets you a quick csv dump of the books table.

You can tailor the resulting columns of the table with the :include, :only, :except, and :methods options. The same options can be passed to associations by providing a hash for the :include option.

>> puts Book.report_table(:all, :include => [:author]).as(:text)
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| id |               title               | author_id | author.id |  author.name   |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 1  |  Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby   |     1     |     1     |      _why      |
| 2  | Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said |     2     |     2     | Philip K. Dick |
| 3  |           Farenheit 451           |     3     |     3     |  Ray Bradbury  |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

>> puts Book.report_table(:all, :only => ['title'],
                          :include => {:author => {:only => 'name'}}).as(:text)
+----------------------------------------------------+
|               title               |  author.name   |
+----------------------------------------------------+
|  Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby   |      _why      |
| Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said | Philip K. Dick |
|           Farenheit 451           |  Ray Bradbury  |
+----------------------------------------------------+

>> puts Book.report_table(:all, :except => ['author_id']).as(:text)
+----------------------------------------+
| id |               title               |
+----------------------------------------+
| 1  |  Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby   |
| 2  | Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said |
| 3  |           Farenheit 451           |
+----------------------------------------+

>> puts Book.report_table(:all, :only => ['title'], :methods => [:author_name]).as(:text)
+----------------------------------------------------+
|               title               |  author_name   |
+----------------------------------------------------+
|  Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby   |      _why      |
| Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said | Philip K. Dick |
|           Farenheit 451           |  Ray Bradbury  |
+----------------------------------------------------+

The acts_as_reportable class method also takes all of the same options as the report_table method, allowing you to set default options for your reports. Any options passed to the report_table method will disable these default options.

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_reportable :except => ['id', 'author_id']
  belongs_to :author
end

You can also pass any of the ordinary ActiveRecord find options to report_table, so you could add conditions if you like:

>> puts Book.report_table(:all, 
          :only => ['title','author.name'], 
          :conditions => "title like '%Poignant%'").as(:text)

report_table returns a Ruport::Data::Table object, so you might want to check out the api docs for Ruport to see what you can do with it.