Faithful reader Greg asked how one can use Gruff with Rails.

There are a few different ways and I hope to make a Rails generator or rake task to make this a little easier. First, add to environment.rb:

require 'gruff'

You might also need to copy the Gruff library files to your Rails app’s ./lib directory (for a shared host).

I like to build a graph in a method and send it straight to the browser. You can use Rails caching with that method to store it on disk.

# ... Use inside any controller

# Send a graph to the browser
def line_graph_report
  g = Gruff::Line.new(400)
  g.title = "Scores for Bart" 
  g.font = File.expand_path('artwork/fonts/Vera.ttf', RAILS_ROOT)
  g.labels = { 0 => 'Mon', 2 => 'Wed', 4 => 'Fri', 6 => 'Sun' }

  # Modify this to represent your actual data models
  @data = Data.find(:all)
  @data.each do |d|
    # Build data into array with something like
    # built_array = d.collect { |e| e.some_number_field.to_f }
    g.data(some_label, built_array)
  end

  send_data(g.to_blob, 
            :disposition => 'inline', 
            :type => 'image/png', 
            :filename => "bart_scores.png")
end

Or, Carlos Villela wrote a helper so you can call Gruff from a view.

Download Gruff on Rails Sample Code

Typo RSS Feed

I upgraded to Typo 2.5.6 and noticed that the RSS feed had changed. Others also had problems with this. I had the most success by putting this at the top of my .htaccess Rewrite section:

RewriteRule ^xml/([a-z]+)$ /xml/rss20/feed.xml [R=301]

Adam Greenfield suggested the following, which may work for you:

RewriteRule ^xml/rss/feed.xml /xml/rss20/feed.xml [R=301]

There is code in Typo that is supposed to handle this, but caching seems to keep it from working correctly for all cases.

UPDATE: You also need to empty your page cache in the Typo admin, then the rewriting will work. Otherwise, the old cached feed will still be served.