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.string :firstName
      t.string :lastName
      #etc.
      t.timestamps
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :entries
  end
end

How do I write a handler that will return the contents of the Entries table as a CSV file (ideally in a way that it will automatically open in Excel)?

class EntriesController < ApplicationController

  def getcsv
    @entries = Entry.find( :all )

    # ??? NOW WHAT ????

  end

end

Answer 1

FasterCSV is definitely the way to go, but if you want to serve it directly from your Rails app, you'll want to set up some response headers, too.

I keep a method around to set up the filename and necessary headers:

def render_csv(filename = nil)
  filename ||= params[:action]
  filename += '.csv'

  if request.env['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] =~ /msie/i
    headers['Pragma'] = 'public'
    headers["Content-type"] = "text/plain" 
    headers['Cache-Control'] = 'no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0'
    headers['Content-Disposition'] = "attachment; filename="#{filename}"" 
    headers['Expires'] = "0" 
  else
    headers["Content-Type"] ||= 'text/csv'
    headers["Content-Disposition"] = "attachment; filename="#{filename}"" 
  end

  render :layout => false
end

Using that makes it easy to have something like this in my controller:

respond_to do |wants|
  wants.csv do
    render_csv("users-#{Time.now.strftime("%Y%m%d")}")
  end
end

And have a view that looks like this: (generate_csv is from FasterCSV)

UserID,Email,Password,ActivationURL,Messages
<%= generate_csv do |csv|
  @users.each do |user|
    csv << [ user[:id], user[:email], user[:password], user[:url], user[:message] ]
  end
end %>