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

You need to set the Content-Type header in your response, then send the data. Content_Type: application/vnd.ms-excel should do the trick.

You may also want to set the Content-Disposition header so that it looks like an Excel document, and the browser picks a reasonable default file name; that's something like Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="#{suggested_name}.xls"

I suggest using the fastercsv ruby gem to generate your CSV, but there's also a builtin csv. The fastercsv sample code (from the gem's documentation) looks like this:

csv_string = FasterCSV.generate do |csv|
  csv << ["row", "of", "CSV", "data"]
  csv << ["another", "row"]
# ...
end