Downloading CSV files in Rails

Providing a way to download data as a CSV file is a common feature in Rails applications.

There is a nice Railscasts episode on the topic here:  Exporting CSV and Excel

I prefer to use a view template to generate my CSV as it gives me a lot of control on the fields that go into the file. But the standard way of invoking this from the controller does not provide a way to specify the filename for the downloaded file


  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.csv 
  end 

With a Show action, for example '/posts/25.csv', the downloaded file would be called '25.csv' which is not useful.

In a response to this Stackoverflow question, Clinton R. Nixon offers up a nice solution.

He has a method called render_csv in his application controller that takes an optional filename. Before calling regular render on your template, it sets several HTTP headers - most importantly a Content-Disposition header with the desired filename. It adds the '.csv' suffix for you and uses the action name as the default if no name if supplied.

With this in place you modify your controller like this


  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.csv { render_csv('myfile') }
  end

Very nice and very useful...