SD Ruby, I'm looking for some suggestions on how best to provide a spreadsheet- like calculation capability in a Rails app. I say "-like" because I'm not trying to present the user with a true web-based Excel replacement or a Google spreadsheet.
Instead I'm trying to figure out the best approach for doing a bunch of financial calculations (NPV, cash flow, amortized costs, etc.) internal to the app and then present some of the data in a read-only format. There are many time series-based calculations (cumulative cost over a number of years, increasing prices due to inflation) as well that are perfectly at home in a spreadsheet. Since this seems like a pretty common need in any app that deals with financial data I figured I'd appeal to the wealth of experience here to see if anyone has suggestions on how to approach this. The calculations will be pretty much fixed, meaning each user will have the same "spreadsheet" but the input variables will change. There are a handful of values the user will be able to change on the fly in the view to see how the overall numbers vary so the approach has to take that into account as well. An Ajax approach is what I'm looking for there, though a client-side JS approach would be fine, too. Let me know if you've seen a solution to this before or if you have an idea how to tackle it. Cheers, Chris -- SD Ruby mailing list [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/sdruby
