Exportable will help you in exporting Rails ActiveRecord models in to different output formats including CSV, XLS, XML etc with just a one liner hook in your model. This Gem is tested against Rails 4 and 5 versions. Support for more output formats will be coming soon.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'exportable'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install exportable

Just add a one liner hook 'exportable' in your model and your model will be provided with class level export methods.

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  exportable
end

You can then use export methods on the model with supporting formats (:csv, :xls, :xml) and field options.

Article.export(:csv)
Article.export(:xml, only: [:title, :user_id])

You can also call export methods on model scopes or ActiveRecord::Relation Object.

Article.where(staus: 'published').export(:csv)

There are also format specific export methods

Article.export_csv
Article.export_xls header: false

These methods will provide a string in sepcified format which you can write directly to a file or stream through Rails controller.

File.open('output.xls', 'wb') {|f| f.write Article.export(:xls) }

or in controller

send_data Article.export(:csv), filename: 'output.csv

Following options are available for hook method and export methods. Please note that options in export methods will always take higher precedence.

###:only

By default all the fields in model will be exported. You can controll the fields to export using 'only' option.

Article.export_csv only: [:title, :published_on, :status]

###:except

Omit exportable fields with 'except' option

Article.export_xml except: [:status]

###:header

By default exporting adds header row. Omit header by option 'header: false'

###:methods

Exporting not only limited to model attributes. You can also add custom model methods to exportable fields.

Article.export methods: [:user_name]

Note: If your model method contains query to association please be carefull to eager load association.

Article.includes(:user).export methods: [:user_name]   

This plugin uses Rspec for testing. Go to gem folder and run:

$ rspec

More output formats are always welcome.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.