Working With Rails

Csv Builder

= CSV Builder

The CSV Builder Rails plugin provides a simple templating system for serving dynamically generated CSV files from your application.

Requirements

CSV Builder requires Rails v2.1.

It also depends upon the FasterCSV gem http://fastercsv.rubyforge.org, which you can install with

$ sudo gem install fastercsv

Encoding conversions are done with Iconv, so make sure you have it on your development/production machine.

Example

CSV template files are suffixed with ’.csv.csvbuilder’, for example ‘index.csv.csvbuilder’

Add rows to your CSV file in the template by pushing arrays of columns into the csv object.

1. First row csv << [ ‘cell 1’, ‘cell 2’ ]
2. Second row csv << [ ‘another cell value’, ‘and another’ ]
3. etc…

You can set the default filename for that a browser will use for ‘save as’ by setting @filename instance variable in your controller’s action method e.g.

@filename = 'report.csv'

You can set the input encoding and output encoding by setting @input_encoding and @output_encoding instance variables. These default to ‘UTF-8’ and ‘LATIN1’ respectively. e.g.

@output_encoding = 'UTF-8'

You can set @csv_options instance variable to define options for FasterCSV generator. For example:

@csv_options = { :force_quotes => true, :col_sep => ';' }

You can also attach a csv file to mail sent out by your application by including a snippet like the following in your mailer method

attachment "text/csv" do |attachment|
  attachment.body = render(:file => 'example/index.csv.csvbuilder')
  attachment.filename = 'report.csv'
end

Copyright© 2008 Econsultancy.com and 2009 Vidmantas Kabošis, released under the MIT license.

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly