Rails to Excel

How do you go from a Rails model to a Comma Seperated Value (CSV) file that you can import to Excel? First install Ruports (Ruby Reports) 
$ sudo gem install ruport
Then just extend ActiveRecord: 
# in config/environment.rb
require 'ruport'

class ActiveRecord::Base
    def self.to_csv
      data_set = Ruport::DataSet.new(self.column_names)
      self.find_all.each do |row|
        data_set << row.attributes
      end
      data_set.to_csv
    end
end
Now you, too, can do magic! 
>> Contact.to_csv #=> A string of CSV data

Posted July 11th, 2006 in Development, Geekery, Rails, Ruby
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Rails to Excel”

July 14th, 2006 at 4:17 PM
gregory Says: #
require "ruport/rails"
class ActiveRecord::Base
acts_as_reportable
def self.to_csv
to_ds.to_csv
end
end

🙂

July 14th, 2006 at 6:07 PM
AQ Says: #

I had no idea about acts_as_reportable. Is their any documentation on it besides RDoc?
I guess either way this proves the idiom that anything you think is elegant in ruby can be done easier and with less lines of code.

July 14th, 2006 at 6:28 PM
gregory Says: #

http://reporting.stonecode.org/ruport-cookbook-pre.pdf

I will actually release this document when I finish it 🙂

to_ds and formatted_table work with ActiveRecord.find, too 🙂

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