data into excel

rubyonrails-talk
1

I was wondering if there is a way to create an excel file with ROR..?

Here is what i have: The app i have has a reports section, that section has many reports that use the find_by_sql in order to customize the query. On the main reports page the use is able to click and a report link and it opens up a new window displaying the data i want to be able to have a link that when clicked it creates an excel file that the user can download.

Is there any way to accomplish that..?

If you'll settle for a CSV that will open up in Excel, then it's pretty easy... here's an example out of our site

entry = VideoGalleryEntry.find_by_id(params[:id]) Tempfile.open("video-gallery-report-#{entry.id}") do |t|      CSV::Writer.generate(t, ',') do |csv|      csv << ["Date", "Number of Views"]      entry.views.sort {|a,b| a.viewed_on <=> b.viewed_on }.each do |v|        csv << [v.viewed_on, v.views]      end    end    t.size    t.rewind    send_data(t.read, :type => 'application/vnd.ms-excel; charset=iso-8859-1; header=present',                      :filename => "video-gallery-report-#{entry.id}.csv") end

2

Don’t forget that there’s always the option of just rendering an HTML table but reporting the content-type as application/vnd.ms-excel .

Then when someone wants a .xls document you just render an html table without a layout and Excel (as well as OpenOffice) will open the file up as a single-sheet excel document. I’ve yet to get this method to work with Google Spreadsheets or Gnumeric though.

First register the MIME type in environment.rb: Mime::Type.register “application/vnd.ms-excel”, :xls, [ “application/excel”, “application/x-excel” ]

Then you can just have a respond_to block with wants.xls? rendering with no layout. Provided you are setup in such a way that the convention of this works for you. It might take a little more work in your own application.

Taylor Singletary Reality Technician

http://www.realitytechnicians.com