Note that you could easily display this data in a table, but using paragraphs and
headers gives the browser more control over wrapping, which makes it display better on
small screens, such as the cell phone display you saw in Figure 5-2.
Now that you??™ve seen how easy it is to create a web application with Rails, let??™s take a
look at a slightly more complicated example.
Graphical Reporting with Rails
Although a lot of web reporting is textual, as in the previous example, it??™s also possible to
do graphical reporting with Rails. To demonstrate, let??™s re-create the team performance
report presented at the end of Chapter 4. However, instead of using Gruff to create
reports, you will use a Flash charting application. The advantage of using a Flash solution
is that it allows for interactivity. For example, you can create tool tips that report exact
values when users move their mouse over an area of the graph.
CHAPTER 5 n CONNECTING YOUR REPORTS TO THE WORLD 91
First, let??™s create a Rails project for the application:
rails team_performance_web
create
create app/controllers
create app/helpers
create app/models
create app/views/layouts
create config/environments
create components
create db
create doc
create lib
create lib/tasks
create log
create public/images
create public/javascripts
.
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