'How to download a CSV file in Ruby on Rails?

In my InvoicesController I have this:

def index
  @invoices = current_user.invoices
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.xls
    format.csv # not working!
  end
end

In my index.html.erb view I have these two download links:

<%= link_to "Download as Excel", invoices_path(:format => "xsl") %>
<%= link_to "Download as CSV", invoices_path(:format => "csv") %>

The templates index.xsl.erb and index.csv.erb do exist as well.

The first link works, i.e. the Excel file gets downloaded to the user's computer. However, the CSV file is rendered in the browser and not downloaded.

What must I do to enable users to download CSV files as well?

Thanks for any help.

ruby-on-railsrubyruby-on-rails-3csvruby-on-rails-3.2


Solution 1:[1]

Try this

format.csv do
  response.headers["Content-Type"] = "text/csv; charset=UTF-8; header=present"
  response.headers["Content-Disposition"] = "attachment; filename=invoices.csv"
end

Solution 2:[2]

I recently discovered

render_csv

maybe check out this railscast (yay)

Solution 3:[3]

I found other solution that worked for me (Rails 3.2 and Ruby 2.3.3)

  1. After generating the csv
report_csv = CSV.generate(col_sep: ";")...
  1. It can be downloaded from controller:
  • Inside the block format.csv we could use
send_data(report_csv, filename: 'banana.csv')
  1. And we could access this action from a link that has the target blank

Sources

This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Overflow and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Source: Stack Overflow

Solution Source
Solution 1 usha
Solution 2 deepfritz
Solution 3

Related Questions