TableView

Writing this before I'm writing code. Likely to progress very slowly in this vision.

The aim of this project is to create a way of describing tabular data to be viewed in various ways, primarily from a rails project (so it might be an engine, but it might just require rails).

The word View is probably a bit confusing given the rails context. Yes it might be a rails view, but it also might not. The aim here isn't to produce something that only outputs as the result of a a controller action, but rather something can output as the result of a controller action, but could also asynchronously produce a result - after a while. But these should be just as easy to generate from a script / console as from a web request. However, this is a view of some data, and typically (though not exclusively I guess) your models.

The aim is to be able to describe something that might have:

• synchronous (for immediate output/display/download) or asychronous (converting seamlessly to an ActiveJob) modes.
• paginated (page=2) or not (get me everything)
• ordering may be specified (and yet there's a way to run this without using all the memory in the world. This is fun in a rails context: find_each is not possible)
• output format: could be csv, could be json, could be html, could be xls, could be (how?) a googlesheet, could be an array (particularly useful for scripts, and for unforseen usages)
• personalization somehow (I'm not interested in some of these columns, don't show me)
• access control somehow (I'm not allowed to see some of these columns, don't show me)

And the notion of "View" still stands: how do you select your ordering? your output format? We don't know and don't care -- that's the job of your controller (in the widest possible sense) to sort out. it's just part of the API.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'table_view'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install table_view

  class MyTableView < TableView::Base
    # likely to change a lot
     def initialize(somethings) 
      @somethings = somethings  
    end
    
    # headers must be ruby identifiers -- lower_snake_case
    def headers
      %w[one two three]
    end
    
    def each_row
      @somethings.each do |something|
        yield [
          @something.one,
          @something.two,
          @something.three
          ]
      end
    end
  end

mtv = MyTableView.new(Something.some_scope) # probably will need to change to new(:some_scope) to allow for activejob
mtv.write_csv(filename)
mtv.as_csv # => string
mtv.as_array # => array of arrays

TODO: need to sketch how will work in the future

• a dsl to specify fields -- to_s for headers, send for each_row
• a mechanism to specify initialization to work for async (to_global_id, or serialize/marshall)
• a mechanism to specify pagination, ordering

mtv = MyTableView.new(Something.some_scope) # probably will need to change to new(:some_scope) to allow for activejob
mtv.output(defined_output).perform_later # ? creates ActiveJob and performs it later, how is the output defined?
mtv.as_json
mtv.as_html # will need some definition of formatting/wrapping for row e.g `def format_row(ary)` or better a partial (which is given hash (row data by headers)) 

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/timdiggins/table_view. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the code of conduct.

  bundle install gem-release
  gem bump
  gem release -pt

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the TableView project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.