Exporting table as Excel Sheet and CSV on ruby on rails

In this post I am not going to brief you on how to export any table as Excel Sheet and CSV in ruby on rails.
It can be found in this link--> Exporting as CSV and EXcel Sheet

I will address the problem which I faced while using it.

Problem

I followed  all the steps mentioned in the link and everything seems to be working fine.
There was no exception and even the download link was working fine.

However when I downloaded the excel file and opened it, the data in the files was not the content of the table . Rather the excel sheet was rendering the lists of objects like this-

#<Colleague:0x35e1e20>,  #<Colleague:0x35e19d0>

Solution

In controller, instead of using @colleagues i.e the instance variable use the model name instead like this.

Note:- It may happen that you are able to export an excel sheet without this solution also. But if you are not  try this !!

Replace this: 

  format.csv { send_data @colleagues.to_csv }
  format.xls { send_data @colleagues.to_csv(col_sep: "\t") }

With

 format.csv { send_data Colleague.to_csv }
 format.xls { send_data Colleague.to_csv(col_sep: "\t") }

Some tips:

• Make sure to restart the server after changing the config files.
• Gems like spreadsheet are also available which can be used for this same purpose.