Importable

Importable aims to be a easy bridge to importing data from csv file to a Rails app. That's achieved by configuring your models through a simple DSL, that will parse and import the given data directly to database.

It's my May 2011 RMU project. :)

Goals

• Simple parser, wrapping the default 1.9.2 CSV parser.
• Setup model <=> headers relation through DSL.

Requirements

For this first implementation, only ruby 1.9.2 or greater are supported.

First iteration

• Create a simple gem, that currently only have the underlining parser, without the DSL stuff.

The parser is actualy a rewrite from a basic parser that I wrote, based on 1.8.7 CSV lib.

The parser is really pretty simple, due to fact that FasterCSV is really good. Heres a simple way to use it:

    parser = Parser.new
    parser.parse_attribute :attribute_name_same_as_header
    parser.parse_attribute :nice_attribute, :from_column => :very_ugly_name
    records = parser.parse "filename.csv"

Only explicit request attributes will be imported. That way we could ignore unwanted columns, and made the proccess less error prone.

The records are returned as array of Hash attributes. That was made for easy record creation through ActiveRecord.

Second iteration

In this iteration, I've implemented the DSL for using Parsable with ActiveRecord. The final result looks like:

    class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
      importable_from_csv

      column :id, :type => :integer
      column :weird_column, :as => :nice_attribute
    end

Now you can tell yor model to import csv files.

    report = Model.import "path/to/file.csv"
    puts report

They will return a report with all errors found when trying to create the records. By now, the errors are only those caught by ActiveRecord validations.

Copywrith

Copyright (c) 2011 Andrew Rosa. See LICENSE.txt for further details.