The gem RGhost has been developed to run independently of Rails but nowadays we’re developing most of our application using Rails. Rails allows us a standard organization in MVC and my mail box is full of questions like “where will I create my rghost reports?”, generally I answer, “create the report as a private method in controller”. This doesn’t satisfy everybody(and me either). With the goal of resolving that, I’ve been writing the new rghost-rails gem that will provide us the best way to work with rghost together with Rails.

In your config/environment.rb add the follows lines

config.gem "rghost", :version => ">=0.8.7"
config.gem "rghost_rails"

so install those gems using the rake task

sudo rake gems:install

Notice that that rghost-rails depends of rghost >= 0.8.7

the rghost-rails needs some basic conventions

1- A file into the view-layer should have .rghost.rb as a suffix, for example to a file/action called invoice

app/views/reports/invoice.rghost.rb

2- Just use a block to format your report, for instance, using the same file invoice.rghost.rb explained above

RGhost::Document.new :paper => :A4 do |doc|
 doc.show "Hi this is my RGhost Report"
 doc.next_row
 doc.grid :data => @clients do |g|
   g.column :name, :title => "Client name", :align => :center
   g.column :site, :title => "Site url"
   g.column :created_at, :title => "Client since", :format => lambda{|d| d.strftime('%d/%m/%Y')}
 end
end

3- In the controller just use a new method rghost_render, that you’ll pass the report format such as pdf, jpg etc, the path for the file is the same as the action name and the file’s name to download it

class ReportsController < ApplicationController
  def print
    @clients = Client.find :all
    rghost_render :pdf, :report => {:action => 'invoice'}, :filename => 'invoice022009.pdf'
  end
end

You also can use the respond_to to render a report/document for each format, before do that, register the mime types entries that you’ll use, in this example we’ll use pdf, jpg and png, so the file config/initializers/mime_types.rb will be

Mime::Type.register "application/pdf", :pdf
Mime::Type.register "image/jpg", :jpg
Mime::Type.register "image/png", :png

Now, write a block for each format

respond_to do |format|
  format.html 
  format.xml  { render :xml => @clients }
  format.pdf { rghost_render :pdf, :report => 'invoice', :filename => "invoice022009.pdf" }
  format.jpg { rghost_render :jpg, :report => 'invoice', :filename => "invoice022009.jpg" }
  format.png { rghost_render :png, :report => 'invoice', :filename => "invoice022009.jpg" }
end

Get your formats by url typing .format after action or action/id

/clients    #html
/clients.xml
/clients.pdf
/clients.jpg
/clients.png

Please let me know if you find any bugs