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 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.

Install

Install as gem (recommended)

Install as a gem:

$ gem install csv_builder

Then add the gem dependency in your config:

# config/environment.rb
config.gem "csv_builder"

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.

# First row
csv << [ 'cell 1', 'cell 2' ]
# Second row
csv << [ 'another cell value', 'and another' ]
# 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