How to export and render for downloading an Excel file

[Serguei Cambour]

I didn't find any examples of how it is possible (if it is) to send a generated Excel file based on some ActiveRecord collection.

For a PDF file generated with Prawn, I could do that as follows:

# in a controller


def show
  @operation = @account.operations.find(params[:id])
  report     = OperationReport.new
  output     = report.to_pdf(@operation)
  respond_to do |format|
    format.pdf do
      send_data output, type: :pdf, disposition: "inline"
    end
  end
end

Any ideas for Excel ? Thank you.

[Serguei Cambour]

I figured out how to do that:

# comments_controller.rb


def index
      @comments = @commentable.comments
      book = ExcelReport.new(@comments).export
      file_contents = StringIO.new
      book.write file_contents
      respond_to do |format|
        format.xls do
          send_data file_contents.string, type: 'application/vnd.ms-excel', filename: 'comments.xls'
        end
      end
    end

You should also register :xls as MIME type in initializers/mime_type.rb file as follows:

Mime::Type.register "application/vnd.ms-excel", :xls

Hope this helps.

[Serguei Cambour]

ExcelReport.new is just a Ruby class where I create an Excel file using standard methods provided by spreadsheet gem to write to rows, columns, etc. and the export method just returns an instance of Spreadsheet::Workbook:

def export

    book = Spreadsheet::Workbook.new

   ....# your sheet design come here

    book

  end

On Tuesday, 7 May 2019 19:30:25 UTC+2, Serguei Cambour wrote:

[Zeno Davatz]

Dear Serguei

Great, thanks for sharing!

Best
Zeno