in rails, how to return records as a csv file

Question

I have a simple database table called \"Entries\":

class CreateEntries < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :entries do |t|
      t.st         


        

Answer 1

Take a look into the FasterCSV gem.

If all you need is excel support, you might also look into generating a xls directly. (See Spreadsheet::Excel)

gem install fastercsv
gem install spreadsheet-excel

I find these options good for opening the csv file in Windows Excel:

FasterCSV.generate(:col_sep => ";", :row_sep => "\r\n") { |csv| ... }

As for the ActiveRecord part, something like this would do:

CSV_FIELDS = %w[ title created_at etc ]
FasterCSV.generate do |csv|
  Entry.all.map { |r| CSV_FIELDS.map { |m| r.send m }  }.each { |row| csv << row }
end