A straightforward way to import data from an excel sheet into your ruby app.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'excelsieur'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install excelsieur

Create a class which declares how columns from an excel sheet map to your ruby object model by extending from the Excelsieur::Importer class:

class UserImporter < Excelsieur::Importer
  # declare the source file
  source "static/ftp/users.xlsx"

  # declare the mapping
  map "First Name", to: :firstname
  map "Last Name", to: :lastname
  map "E-Mail", to: :email
end

Create an instance of your import and run it. By default it infers the model to be imported from the classname, e.g.:

import = UserImport.new
import.run # calls User.create!(row) for each row

The result is an instance of Excelsieur::Result:

result = import.run
result.status
# => :succeeded
result.errors
# => { missing_column: [], model: [] }
result.report
# => #<struct Excelsieur::Report inserted=2, failed=0>

A summary of the ActiveRecord model validations is available after running the importer. The Error objects indicates the failed excel row and the corresponding errors.

import = UserImport.new
import.run

import.errors[:model]
# => [#<struct Excelsieur::Error row=3, errors=["First name can't be blank"]>]

A summary of the successfully inserted and failed records is available after running the importer.

import = UserImport.new
import.run

import.report
# => #<struct Excelsieur::Report inserted=2, failed=1>

import.total
# => 3

When setting transaction true no record is inserted if any one of them has an error.

class UserImporter < Excelsieur::Importer
  # declare the source file
  source "static/ftp/users.xlsx"

  # only insert all rows if none of them have an error
  transaction true

  # declare the mapping
  map "First Name", to: :firstname
  map "Last Name", to: :lastname
  map "E-Mail", to: :email
end

If a block is passed to run the block needs to raise an error in order to roll back the transaction.

This means that the following will trigger a rollback if the model is not valid:

UserImport.new.run do |row|
  User.create!(row)
end

On the other hand, the following won't trigger a rollback if the model is invalid:

UserImport.new.run do |row|
  User.create(row)
end

You may want to pass an excel file per instance. You can also define your own import behavior by passing a block to the run method:

import = UserImport.new("users/all.xlsx")
import.run do |row|
  User.create!(row) # raise an exception if the data doesn't match your expectations
end

Be aware of a few limitations when considering this gem:

• only supports the first sheet in an excel file
• only supports .xlsx file format
• no export, just import

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/panter/excelsieur.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.