RailsXLS Revived October 2nd, 2008

RailsXLS is a plugin to generate Excel files from a .rxls view. It uses a Java Bridge to talk to the Jakarta POI library. I’ve used this plugin in a few projects and it works great for generating .xls files.

On a recent project I once again needed an “Export to Excel” feature. The project is on Rails Edge, and apparently there were some changes to how TemplateHandlers are handled since the plugin was written. I dove into the code and recreated the plugin for Rails Edge / 2.2.

You can find the new plugin on github

It’s usage is quite easy:

# in your environment.rb
Mime::Type.register "application/excel", :xls

# in controller
def index
  @clients = Client.all
  respond_to do |speaks|
    speaks.html
    speaks.xls { render :layout => false }
  end
end

# in index.xls.rxls
sheet = workbook.createSheet("Client List")

@clients.each_with_index do |client, index|
  row = sheet.createRow(index)
  row.createCell(0).setCellValue(client.id)
  row.createCell(1).setCellValue(client.name)
end

As you can see there are still some rough patches in the view. I’m working on a wrapper around this, so all obvious tasks can be easily performed.

Any comments/suggestions for the plugin are very welcome! A big thanks to Venkata Subramaniyan for writing the initial plugin, which can be found here

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