Command Line Reporter

This gem provides a DSL that makes it easy to write reports of various types in ruby. It eliminates the need to litter your source with puts statements, instead providing a more readable, expressive interface to your application. Some of the best features include:

• Formatters that automatically indicate progress
• Table syntax similar to HTML that makes it trivial to format your data in rows and columns
• Easily created headers and footers for your report
• Output suppression that makes it easy for your script to support a quiet flag
• Capture report output as a string

The latest release, thanks to a contribution from Josh Brown, allows you to choose between UTF8 or ASCII for drawing tables. By default it will use UTF8 if your system supports it. Here is an example of output you can generate easily with "the reporter":

Installation

It is up on rubygems.org so add it to your bundle in the Gemfile

gem 'command_line_reporter', '>=3.0'

or do it the old fashioned way:

gem install command_line_reporter

Usage

The gem provides a mixin that can be included in your scripts.

require 'command_line_reporter'

class MyReport
  include CommandLineReporter
  ...
end

Wiki

The Wiki has all of the documentation necessary for getting you started.

API Reference

There are several methods the mixin provides that do not depend on the formatter used:

• header(hash) and footer(hash)
  • :title - The title text for the section. Default: 'Report'
  • :width - The width in characters for the section. Default: 100
  • :align - 'left'|'right'|'center' align the title text. Default: 'left'
  • :spacing - Number of vertical lines to leave as spacing after|before the header|footer. Default: 1
  • :timestamp - Include a line indicating the timestamp below|above the header|footer text. Either true|false. Default: false
  • :rule - true|false indicates whether to include a horizontal rule below|above the header|footer. Default: false
  • :color - The color to use for the terminal output i.e. 'red' or 'blue' or 'green'
  • :bold - true|false to boldface the font
• report(hash) {block}
  • The first argument is a hash that defines the options for the method. See the details in the formatter section for allowed values.
  • The second argument is a block of ruby code that you want executed within the context of the reporter. Any ruby code is allowed. See the examples that follow in the formatter sections for details.
• formatter=(string)
  • Factory method indicating the formatter you want your application to use. At present the 2 formatters are (Default: 'nested'):
  • 'progress' - Use the progress formatter
  • 'nested' - Use the nested (or documentation) formatter
• _horizontalrule(hash)
  • :char - The character used to build the rule. Default: '-'
  • :width - The width in characters of the rule. Default: 100
  • :color - The color to use for the terminal output i.e. 'red' or 'blue' or 'green'
  • :bold - true|false to boldface the font
• _verticalspacing(int)
  • Number of blank lines to output. Default: 1
• datetime(hash)
  • :align - 'left'|'center'|'right' alignment of the timestamp. Default: 'left'
  • :width - The width of the string in characters. Default: 100
  • :format - Any allowed format from #strftime#. Default: %Y-%m-%d %H:%I:%S%p
  • :color - The color to use for the terminal output i.e. 'red' or 'blue' or 'green'
  • :bold - true|false to boldface the font
• aligned(string, hash)
  • text - String to display
  • :align - 'left'|'right'|'center' align the string text. Default: 'left'
  • :width - The width in characters of the string text. Default: 100
  • :color - The color to use for the terminal output i.e. 'red' or 'blue' or 'green'
  • :bold - true|false to boldface the font
• table(hash) {block}
  • The first argument is a hash that defines properties of the table.
  • :border - true|false indicates whether to include borders around the table cells
  • :encoding - :ascii or :unicode (default unicode)
  • The second argument is a block which includes calls the to the row method
• row {block}
  • :header - Set to true to indicate if this is a header row in the table.
  • :color - The color to use for the terminal output i.e. 'red' or 'blue' or 'green'
  • :bold - true|false to boldface the font
• column(string, hash)
  • text - String to display in the table cell
  • options - The options to define the column
  • :span - defines the number of columns to span across in the table
  • :width - defines the width of the column
  • :padding - The number of spaces to put on both the left and right of the text.
  • :align - Allowed values are left|right|center
  • :color - The color to use for the terminal output i.e. 'red' or 'blue' or 'green'
  • :bold - true|false to boldface the font
  • :wrap - character|word to break multi-line cells on character or word boundary.
• _suppressoutput - Suppresses output stream that goes to STDOUT
• _captureoutput - Captures all of the output stream to a string and restores output to STDOUT
• _restoreoutput - Restores the output stream to STDOUT

To Do

• Add a formatter that supports html output

Contributors

• Dennis Ideler submitted pull requests getting CLR up to date and fixing issues with border colors
• Josh Brown added the ability to encode tables in either ascii or utf8
• Stefan Frank for raising the issue that he could not capture report output in a variable as a string
• Mike Gunderloy for suggesting the need for suppressing output and putting together a fantastic pull request and discussion
• Jason Rogers and Peter Suschlik for their contributions as well on items I missed

License

Copyright (c) 2011-2017 Wes Bailey

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.