Exporting data from Rails into XML and Excel

Question

I use RubyOnRails and I want to get the data from within my database into an XML or Excel format.

How can I do it?

What kind of database are you using? SQLite? If so, you may find this post useful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6076984/how-to-export-the-results-of-my-query-to-csv-file-sqlite. Excel can easily handle CSV files. — Nicholas Flees, Apr 14 '14 at 17:38
Sorry. Didn't notice that you tagged the post with mysql. This answer should help: http://stackoverflow.com/a/356605/868691 — Nicholas Flees, Apr 14 '14 at 17:44

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 14 '14 at 17:45

2

Exporting to XML is simple, you can call to_xml method on your items and render the result or use render :xml

So for example, in your controller:

respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.xml { render xml: @items }
end

When it comes to Excel, there is a railscast on exporting to CSV (which can be easily imported to Excel) and XLS.

answered Apr 14 '14 at 17:45

Jakub K

Is there a way to get it to xml file in the rails c? – ZachyBear Apr 14 '14 at 22:18
Sure, you can use the `to_xml` method on your collection and save the result into a file. For help with writing to files see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2777802/how-to-write-to-file-in-ruby – Jakub K Apr 14 '14 at 22:24
after trying: orders = Order.all_to_xml() I got this error NoMethodError: undefined method `to_xml' for # – ZachyBear Apr 15 '14 at 14:43
Try `orders = Order.all.to_xml` – Jakub K Apr 15 '14 at 15:21
Thanks so much! That did it<3 – ZachyBear Apr 16 '14 at 16:36
do you know where the default location the xml file would be saved to? – ZachyBear Apr 16 '14 at 17:09
You have to save the file yourself, such as `File.open('filename', 'w') { |f| f.write(Order.all.to_xml) }`; the file `filename` should be saved in the root folder of your app. – Jakub K Apr 16 '14 at 17:24
and after that I got a 63112976 returned in rails c, know what this means? – ZachyBear Apr 16 '14 at 19:20
Looks like the number of characters written – Jakub K Apr 16 '14 at 20:08
awsome thanks, found the files in vim and now I just need to export them to excel and I'm done! I am so close thanks again for all your help Jacob – ZachyBear Apr 16 '14 at 20:23
is there a way to save the to_xml file to desktop or any other directory on my computer? I am having a hard time getting those xml files out of vimT.T – ZachyBear Apr 16 '14 at 21:46

1 Answers1