Ruby-on-rails – in rails, how to return records as a csv file

csvruby-on-rails

I have a simple database table called "Entries":

class CreateEntries < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :entries do |t|
      t.string :firstName
      t.string :lastName
      #etc.
      t.timestamps
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :entries
  end
end

How do I write a handler that will return the contents of the Entries table as a CSV file (ideally in a way that it will automatically open in Excel)?

class EntriesController < ApplicationController

  def getcsv
    @entries = Entry.find( :all )

    # ??? NOW WHAT ????

  end

end

Best Solution

FasterCSV is definitely the way to go, but if you want to serve it directly from your Rails app, you'll want to set up some response headers, too.

I keep a method around to set up the filename and necessary headers:

def render_csv(filename = nil)
  filename ||= params[:action]
  filename += '.csv'

  if request.env['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] =~ /msie/i
    headers['Pragma'] = 'public'
    headers["Content-type"] = "text/plain" 
    headers['Cache-Control'] = 'no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0'
    headers['Content-Disposition'] = "attachment; filename=\"#{filename}\"" 
    headers['Expires'] = "0" 
  else
    headers["Content-Type"] ||= 'text/csv'
    headers["Content-Disposition"] = "attachment; filename=\"#{filename}\"" 
  end

  render :layout => false
end

Using that makes it easy to have something like this in my controller:

respond_to do |wants|
  wants.csv do
    render_csv("users-#{Time.now.strftime("%Y%m%d")}")
  end
end

And have a view that looks like this: (generate_csv is from FasterCSV)

UserID,Email,Password,ActivationURL,Messages
<%= generate_csv do |csv|
  @users.each do |user|
    csv << [ user[:id], user[:email], user[:password], user[:url], user[:message] ]
  end
end %>
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