to_google_spreadsheet

to_google_spreadsheet makes it trivial to populate a Google spreadsheet with an Array of Ruby objects.

# Adds the users Bob and John to the default spreadsheet in the worksheet Employees
[{:name => "Bob", :age => 26}, {:name => "John", :age => 28}].to_google_spreadsheet("Employees")

Results in:

Image of Google spreadsheets result once running above command

You could also use this within Rails like so:

Account.all.to_google_spreadsheet("Accounts")

Usage

Installation

$ gem install to_google_spreadsheet

Setup

You must provide your Google Docs credentials, optionally you can supply a default spreadsheet to use:

module ToGoogleSpreadsheet
  CREDENTIALS = ["[email protected]", "seekrit"]
  DEFAULT_SPREADSHEET = "spreadsheet_key" # see note below
end

The spreadsheet key is found in the URL when visiting the spreadsheet:

Image showing how the key is found in the URL in Google Docs

Usage

#to_google_spreadsheet is simply a method defined on Array, thus any subclasses hereof should work with to_google_spreadsheet as expected. Array#to_google_spreadsheet takes two arguments:

class Array
  include ToGoogleSpreadsheet

  def to_google_spreadsheet(worksheet, spreadsheet = nil)
    session = GoogleSpreadsheet.login(*CREDENTIALS)
    spreadsheet = session.spreadsheet_by_key(spreadsheet || DEFAULT_SPREADSHEET)
    @ws = spreadsheet.find_or_create_worksheet_by_name(worksheet)
    @ws.set_header_columns(self.first)
    @ws.populate(self)
    @ws.save
  end
end

The first argument is the name of the worksheet within the spreadsheet, e.g. "Accounts", if it doesn't already exist, it will be created. The second, optional, argument is the spreadsheet key, if it is not supplied, the default spreadsheet, defined by ToGoogleSpreadsheet::DEFAULT_SPREADSHEET, will be used.

Supported objects

assert array.all? {|e| [OpenStruct,Hash,ActiveRecord::Base].any? { |type| e.kind_of?(type) }}

I.e. anything that is #kind_of? Hash, an OpenStruct or an ActiveRecord model. It is easy to add support for additional types.

License

to_google_spreadsheet is released under the MIT license.