Chris, I was researching this same issue a while back, and this GitHub project has some sample code that might get you going on the roll-your-own approach.
http://blog.rubyyot.com/2009/05/generating-letters-like-a-prawn-star/ http://github.com/rubyyot/whaler/tree/first_post - John On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 9:27 PM, Chris McCann <[email protected]> wrote: > SD Ruby, > > One of my clients is a charitable foundation that generates lots of > letters to donors thanking them for their donations. I've migrated > their old system from an Access database to a Rails app. I'm looking > for a good replacement for how they used to generate letters to their > donors. > > Previously they'd do a Word mail merge on the results of an Access > query. That's a rather lengthy process to generate letters one at a > time and I'm working on a much more "point and click" solution for > them. > > I generate PDFs in the app using Prawn and that works fine for the > accounting and other tabular type reports they need that don't have to > be customized. It's a klutzy approach for form letters that need > customization. > > The "letter generator" I envision would let them create new letter > templates as required and keep them in the database. There would be > some sort of templating system, perhaps like Liquid, that lets them > easily add select active record model fields to the letters, just like > Word's mail merge does. Finally, the letters would be generated in > PDF format. > > Can anyone point out a potential solution to this in the form of a gem > or plugin? How about re-purposing something like a CMS? This seems > like a pretty common need so I'm surprised my googling == nil. > > I'm not averse to rolling my own for this feature but figured I'd > check with the smart folks here first before I headed in that > direction. > > Thanks for any advice on this subject. > > Cheers, > > Chris > > -- > SD Ruby mailing list > [email protected] > http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
