Caracal-Rails

Caracal is a ruby library for dynamically creating professional-quality Microsoft Word documents.

Caracal-Rails is a drop in solution for registering the Microsoft Word mime type and for establishing a template handler in Rails for the :docx format. All caracal documents are rendered with an explicit block passing a reference to the Caracal::Document object named docx.

Please see the caracal-example repository for a working demonstration of the library's capabilities.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'caracal-rails'

Then execute:

$ bundle install

Usage

Design your controller normally and respond to the docx format:

class ReportsController < ApplicationController
  def show
    # collect your models/view models here

    respond_to do |format|
      format.docx { headers["Content-Disposition"] = "attachment; filename=\"caracal.docx\"" }
    end
  end
end

Then add a view file with the Caracal extension:

apps/views/reports/show.docx.caracal

Specify the format docx in your route:

resources :reports, only: [:show], format: 'docx'

Inside your view, simply issue Caracal commands on the document object:

docx.font 'Droid Serif'

docx.style 'special' do
  font   'Droid Serif'
  italic true
  size   16
end

docx.h1 'Quarterly Report'
docx.hr
@report.clients.each do |client|
  docx.h2 client.name
  docx.p  'Lorem ipsum dolor...'
  docx.p do
    text 'This is a sentence with a '
    link 'link', 'http://www.google.com/', style: 'special'
    text ' in the middle.'
  end
  docx.img image_url('https://www.example.com/logo.png'), width: 300, height: 200, align: 'right'
  docx.br
  docx.table client.tablular_data, border_size: 4 do
    cell_style  rows[0], background_color: '3366cc', color: 'ffffff', bold: true
  end
  docx.page
  docx.p 'This is an bulleted list.'
  docx.ul do
    li do
      strong 'Item 1'
      text   'More text'
    end
    li 'Item 2'
  end
end

See the Caracal library for more details.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/trade-informatics/caracal-rails/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Why is It Called Caracal?

Because my son likes caracals. :)

Inspiration

A tip of the hat to the wonderful PDF generation libraries Prawn and Prawnto.

License

Copyright (c) 2014 Trade Informatics, Inc

MIT License