= Ekuseru

Ekuseru is a gem to generate Microsoft Excel documents with Rails. This gem provides templating abilities to create excel documents.

== Installation

=== Rails 3

• Edit your Gemfile, add:

  gem "ekuseru"

• then run

  bundle install

=== Rails 2

Ekuseru master branch now support rails 3 and is NOT backward compatible. To use ekuseru in rails 2, install it as plugin :

• cd vendor/plugins
• git clone git://github.com/xinuc/ekuseru.git
• git checkout remotes/origin/rails2 -b rails2

== Usage

=== Controller

To generate xls document, add respond_to :xls to your controller.

Example:

class ProductsController < ApplicationController respond_to :html, :xls

def index
  @products = Product.all
  respond_with @products
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 xls 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/GUIDE_txt.html

You can set the filename sent to the user with __filename 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 'Download as Excel', products_path(:format => :xls) %>

== Credits

• Jacob Rothstein (http://github.com/jbr)
• Micah Geisel (https://github.com/botandrose)