Export to Excel in Rails 3 without a Gem

Export to Excel in Rails 3 without a Gem

Creating Demo project

 rails new xcel_demo –d mysql

Creating a User model

rails g scaffold User name:string email:string content:string

Add a MIME type in \config\initializers\mime_type.rb

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

Add a xls format output to the method in the Controller

  def index
    @users = User.all

    respond_to do |format|
      format.html # index.html.erb
      format.xls
      format.xml  { render :xml => @users }
    end
  end

Creating the view for the XLS

Now create a view to render the xls file. Here as we have modified the index method we will create a view index.xls.erb for the same in the views for Users

<h1>Listing users</h1>

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Name</th>
    <th>City</th>
    <th>Gender</th>
    <th>Phone</th>
    <th>Address</th>
    <th></th>
    <th></th>
    <th></th>
  </tr>

<% @users.each do |user| %>
  <tr>
    <td><%= user.name %></td>
    <td><%= user.city %></td>
    <td><%= user.gender %></td>
    <td><%= user.phone %></td>
    <td><%= user.address %></td>
  </tr>
<% end %>
</table>

<br />

The text in the <th> tags are the headers and <td> tags are the data for the specified columns

Adding the link to export excel on the Index page

 <%= link_to 'Export XLS', url_for(:format => 'xls') %>

This will allow the data on index page to be exported in Excel Format.