RubyBrigade.org – A Rails Rumble Success

Just wanted to mention our Rails Rumble project, RubyBrigade.org. Jason Perry, James Seaman and I
worked through the weekend to build RubyBrigade.org – a geographically aware database of Ruby User groups.

Big thanks to James for the killer hand drawn illustrations and interface. Big thanks to Jason & Katie for letting us take over their house for the weekend.

Features:

• Google Maps Integration
• Sub-domains for each group
• Geocoding: either by the search box or by sub-domain!
• RSS and iCal feed parsing
• Display latest user groups
• Display upcoming events across all groups
• Display blog posts & upcoming events for individual groups
• ReCAPTCHA for spam prevention
• No authentication required

More Screenshots

View a Brigade

Edit a Brigade

Delete a Brigade

404 Message

If you like what you see, vote for us!

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How to generate CSV files in Rails

A while back someone posted on rubyonrails-talk asking how to export to CSV from Rails. I posted a solution, and people seemed to dig it, so I’ll share it again here.

Use FasterCSV

Get the FasterCSV gem. Why? It’s faster, and easier to use. Once you’ve got it, require it in environment.rb. Here’s an abbreviated version of my working controller method. Copy/paste/modify. And you’re done!

def export_to_csv 
  @users = User.find(:all) 
  csv_string = FasterCSV.generate do |csv| 
    # header row 
    csv << ["id", "first_name", "last_name"] 

    # data rows 
    @users.each do |user| 
      csv << [user.id, user.first_name, user.last_name] 
    end 
  end 

  # send it to the browsah
  send_data csv_string, 
            :type => 'text/csv; charset=iso-8859-1; header=present', 
            :disposition => "attachment; filename=users.csv" 
end

HTML or CSV, have it your way

Now, if we wanted to get all clever about it, we could go further and serve both html and CSV data with only one action, using respond_to. This also requires that you add a RESTful route (map.resources :users) to your routes.rb file:

def index 
  @users = User.find(:all) 
  respond_to do |wants| 
    wants.html 
    wants.csv do 
      csv_string = FasterCSV.generate do |csv| 
        # header row 
        csv << ["id", "first_name", "last_name"] 
        # data rows 
        @users.each do |user| 
          csv << [user.id, user.first_name, user.last_name] 
        end 
      end 
      # send it to the browsah
      send_data csv_string, 
                :type => 'text/csv; charset=iso-8859-1; header=present', 
                :disposition => "attachment; filename=users.csv" 
    end 
  end 
end

Now if the user requests:

/users

she’ll get HTML. If she requests:

/users.csv

You get the point.

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AssetPackager released!

Asset Packager has been released! (Formerly known as MergeJS) New features include:

• support for css files
• versioning of individual packages
• use of more meaningful subversion revision numbers (if available) (thanks Chris Van Pelt!)
• namespaced rake tasks
• no more revision numbers in the yaml file
• lotsa refactoring
• unit tests
• more intuitive names for everything!

Go here to check it out: AssetPackager

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