= CSV Builder The CSV Builder Rails plugin provides a simple templating system for serving dynamically generated CSV files from your application. == Requirements CSV Builder requires Rails v2.1. It also depends upon the FasterCSV gem http://fastercsv.rubyforge.org, which you can install with $ sudo gem install fastercsv Encoding conversions are done with Iconv, so make sure you have it on your development/production machine. == Example CSV template files are suffixed with '.csv.csvbuilder', for example 'index.csv.csvbuilder' Add rows to your CSV file in the template by pushing arrays of columns into the csv object. # First row csv << [ 'cell 1', 'cell 2' ] # Second row csv << [ 'another cell value', 'and another' ] # etc... You can set the default filename for that a browser will use for 'save as' by setting @filename instance variable in your controller's action method e.g. @filename = 'report.csv' You can set the input encoding and output encoding by setting @input_encoding and @output_encoding instance variables. These default to 'UTF-8' and 'LATIN1' respectively. e.g. @output_encoding = 'UTF-8' You can set @csv_options instance variable to define options for FasterCSV generator. For example: @csv_options = { :force_quotes => true, :col_sep => ';' } You can also attach a csv file to mail sent out by your application by including a snippet like the following in your mailer method attachment "text/csv" do |attachment| attachment.body = render(:file => 'example/index.csv.csvbuilder') attachment.filename = 'report.csv' end Copyright (c) 2008 Econsultancy.com and 2009 Vidmantas Kabošis, released under the MIT license.