Open Source Ecosystems

EXCELlent is a custom template handler (XERB) for specifying XLS files just as regular XHTML tables. This is kind of limited at the moment, but damn - this is 0.0.1 alpha release :)

Currently EXCELlent (or XERB) supports

table, tr, td, th tags
table name property for naming sheet
font-size, font-weight, background-color and color css attributes of cells

First things first - installation

ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/stevo/excellent.git

EXCELlent relies on spreadsheet and nokogiri gems, so if you haven't already...

gem install spreadsheet
gem install nokogiri

Then in your controller, add new respond_to format

def index
    @fruits = [{:name => "apple", :color => "green"},{:name => "peach", :color => "orange"}]

    respond_to do |format|
        format.html
        format.xml  { render :xml => @fruits }
        format.xls # Here it is !
    end
end

Then we need our view. Just create file named index.xls.xerb and create a simple table

<table name="Fruits">

    <tr>
        <td></td>
        <td></td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td style="font-size:20px;">Name</td>
        <td>Color</td>
    </tr>

    <% @fruits.each do |fruit| %>
        <tr>
            <td style="color:red;font-weight:bold;"><%= fruit[:name] %></td>
            <td><%= fruit[:color] %></td>
        </tr>
    <% end %>

</table>

From now on, simple link

<%= link_to 'xls', fruits_path(:format => :xls) %>

will enable you to download Excel version of your table :)

Styling issues: For unknown reason executing spreadsheet::row::set_format method on the first row and it's last cell make whole last column disappeared in the result file. Because of it styling in the first row is currently ignored.