= Ekuseru Ekuseru is a plugin to generate Microsoft Excel documents with Rails. This plugin provides templating abilities to create excel documents using Spreadsheet gem.
Having a template is very convenient, because we can define how our file looks like in the views, and we can access all helper methods defined in rails. == Installation === Spreadsheet gem You will need to install Spreadsheet gem to use this plugin. * Edit your config/environtment.rb, add: config.gem "spreadsheet" * Install Spreadsheet gem if you haven't, run: rake gems:install * or just install it with: sudo gem install spreadsheet === Ekuseru plugin Run the following command in your RAILS_ROOT: ./script/plugin install git://github.com/xinuc/ekuseru.git Or, simply get the tarball at: http://github.com/xinuc/ekuseru/tarball/master extract it to your vendor/plugins and rename it to 'ekuseru' == Usage === Controller To generate xls document, add <code>format.xls</code> in your controller. Example: class ProductsController < ApplicationController def index @products = Product.all respond_to do |format| format.html format.xls # add this line to generate xls document end end ... end === Template Ekuseru will use .eku files as the template. So, with the example above, we will need to create 'index.xls.eku' in app/views/products/. Basically it's just an ordinary ruby file. In the template, we will get a <code>xls</code> variable which is a Spreadsheet::Workbook object ready to be modified like whatever we want. Consult the Spreadsheet documentation to create the template. http://spreadsheet.rubyforge.org/files/GUIDE_txt.html You can set the filename sent to the user with <code>__filename</code> variable. In the template : # set the filename sent to the user with __filename variable # this is optional, if you don't set it, the name will be like products.xls __filename = "Products Catalog.xls" # we get 'xls' variable which is a Workbook object # then we can create some worksheet to work with, with create_worksheet method sheet1 = xls.create_worksheet # fill the [0, 0] cell sheet1[0, 0] = "Products Catalog" # Worksheet#row will return a Row object. We can modify it just like an Array. # this code will return the second row and fill the cells. sheet1.row(1).concat ["Name", "Price", "Stock", "Description"] # we can access the instance variable we set in the controller, just like # in erb template @products.each_with_index do |p, i| sheet1.update_row i+2, p.name, p.price, p.stock, p.description end # we can add some formatting using Spreadsheet::Format object title_format = Spreadsheet::Format.new(:color => :blue, :weight => :bold, :size => 18) sheet1.row(0).set_format(0, title_format) bold = Spreadsheet::Format.new(:weight => :bold) sheet1.row(1).default_format = bold That's it. Then you can create a link to the xls file if you want, like: <%= link_to 'Excel', products_path(:format => :xls) %>
