= ActiveRecord.to_csv
== Description
A simple ActiveRecord::Base to_csv() class method that preserves scopes. to_csv() returns the entire contents including the header ready to be written to file.
== Usage
Movie.to_csv
title,director_id title,director_id Black Swan,0 Inception,1 The Fighter,2 The King's Speech,3 The Kids Are All Right,4
Movie.bad.to_csv
title,director_id The Kids Are All Right,4
Note that #to_csv is called like a scope or query. The following will NOT give you the same results:
Movie.all.to_csv
This will use Ruby's Array#to_csv method.
=== Attribute#to_csv
After a model object's attributes are collected, to_csv is called on the resulting array. However, this poses a problem because it will blindly convert the attributes to a string -- i.e. call to_s on them. If one of your attributes is a Date, then calling to_s may produce unwanted output. For example, if you have Date::DATE_FORMATS[:default] = '%d %B, %Y' your dates will have the month written out like 'January', 'February', etc. To counter this, this gem will make an attempt to call to_csv() on each attribute. To get YYYY-MM-DD output, you could do something like:
class Date def to_csv strftime('%Y-%m-%d') end end
Note that object.send(attribute_name) is used, so datetime fields will be returned as ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone objects.
== TODO
Options to specify columns to be included (currently, id and timestamp columns are excluded).
== Compatibility
Tested with ActiveRecord v3.0.5
http://gem-testers.org/gems/active_record_to_csv
== Related gems