XML/Excel export?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Good morning, all!

Can anyone point me to the direction of creating a link that leads to the downloading of a rails generated XML file. I have an app and a database both called catalog, and I have a controller called store, and a model called product. The database has a products table with a handful of manually input product items.

The controller is quite plain with an index and a @products = Product.find(:all)

How may I create a button or link that leads to the generating of an XML file and one to Excel (is it possible? I mean, copyright and loyalty to MS a concern?). And how can I make it so that after clicking this link or button or both, the browser prompts for a download instead of displaying it on itself like Firefox and Internet Explorer do. Google Chrome just displays it in one line, I haven't checked Safari yet.

Thank you in advance!

2

I've used the tutorial at the top with great success the last couple of weeks.

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToExportToExcel

3

Hey there,

Presumably you have a ProductsController, if you have a route for your Products resource Rails should cope with a request for

http://localhost:3000/products.xml

./config/routes.rb map.resources :products

you then write a view and format the XML as you'd like it to appear in the following view file ./app/views/products/index.rxml.erb

RobL

Nik wrote:

4

Thank You for both of your suggestions. Let me try it out.

RobL, how does one format an XML file? I am sorry to trouble you if this seems very elementary which I wouldn't suspect otherwise. Because I thought XML is always just a bunch of structured data and Firefox is the one that formats it and displays it.

Or do you mean, I giving the data the structure I want in that rxml.erb file?

Thank You!