CSV Builder¶ ↑

The CSV Builder Rails plugin provides a simple templating system for serving dynamically generated CSV files from your application.

Requirements¶ ↑

CSV Builder works with:

• Ruby 1.8.6/7 and Rails 2.1 or higher

• Ruby 1.9.x and Rails 2.3.6

• JRuby 1.4.0 and Rails 2.1 or higher

If you run Ruby 1.8.6/7 or JRuby it also depends upon the FasterCSV gem, 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 a gem (recommended)¶ ↑

$ gem install csv_builder

Then add the gem dependency in your config:

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

Install as a plugin¶ ↑

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/vidmantas/csv_builder.git

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 respond with csv in your controller as well:

respond_to do |format|
  format.html
  format.csv # make sure you have action_name.csv.csvbuilder template in place
end

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

Troubleshooting¶ ↑

There’s a known bug of encoding error in Ruby 1.9 and Rails 2.3.5

For more details see rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/2188-i18n-fails-with-multibyte-strings-in-ruby-19-similar-to-2038

This ticket will be solved Rails 2.3.6, hopefully ;-)

Copyright © 2008 Econsultancy.com and 2009 Vidmantas Kabošis, released under the MIT license