in rails, how to return records as a csv file

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FasterCSV is definitely the way to go, but if you want to serve it directly from your Rails app, you’ll want to set up some response headers, too.

I keep a method around to set up the filename and necessary headers:

def render_csv(filename = nil)
  filename ||= params[:action]
  filename += '.csv'

  if request.env['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] =~ /msie/i
    headers['Pragma'] = 'public'
    headers["Content-type"] = "text/plain" 
    headers['Cache-Control'] = 'no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0'
    headers['Content-Disposition'] = "attachment; filename=\"#{filename}\"" 
    headers['Expires'] = "0" 
  else
    headers["Content-Type"] ||="text/csv"
    headers["Content-Disposition"] = "attachment; filename=\"#{filename}\"" 
  end

  render :layout => false
end

Using that makes it easy to have something like this in my controller:

respond_to do |wants|
  wants.csv do
    render_csv("users-#{Time.now.strftime("%Y%m%d")}")
  end
end

And have a view that looks like this: (generate_csv is from FasterCSV)

UserID,Email,Password,ActivationURL,Messages
<%= generate_csv do |csv|
  @users.each do |user|
    csv << [ user[:id], user[:email], user[:password], user[:url], user[:message] ]
  end
end %>

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