Speaky CSV

CSV exporting and importing for ActiveRecord and ActiveModel records.

Speaky lets the format of csv files to be customized, but it does require certain conventions to be followed. At a high level, the csv ends up looking similar to the way active record data gets serialized into form parameters which will be familiar to many rails developers. The advantage of this approach is that associated records be imported and exported.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'speaky_csv'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install speaky_csv

Usage

Subclass SpeakyCsv::Base and define a csv format for an active record class. For example:

# in app/csv/user_csv.rb
class UserCsv < SpeakyCsv::Base
  define_csv_fields do |config|
    config.field :id, :first_name, :last_name, :email

    config.has_many :roles do |r|
      r.field :role_name
    end
  end
end

See the rdoc for more details on how to configure the format.

Once the format is defined records can be exported like this:

$ exporter = UserCsv.new.exporter(User.all)
$ File.open('users.csv', 'w') { |io| exporter.each { |row| io.write row } }

Recommendations

Add id and _destroy fields for active record models
For associations, use nested_attributes_for and add id and _destroy fields
Use optimistic locking and add lock_version to csv

TODO

[x] export only fields
[x] configurable id field (key off an external_id for example)
[x] export validations
[x] attr import validations
[x] active record import validations
[ ] has_one associations
[ ] required fields (make lock_version required for example)

Contributing

Fork it ( http://github.com/ajh/speaky_csv/fork )
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request