Question

This is probably very simple: I’m creating a workbook (i.e. spreadsheet) using the Spreadsheet gem, and just want to send the Excel data directly to the client without having to write to a file first.

Right now, I’m writing the workbook to a file in the tmp dir, and then sending it using send_file, but that seems terribly inelegant as I don’t need the file once it’s been sent (not even for caching purposes).

Optimally, I’d like to just call send_data with the workbook data in a respond_to :xls block.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The workbook’s write method takes any path or IO object, so instead of passing it a file or file path you could pass it a StringIO., something along the lines of

require 'stringio'
class MyController < ApplicationController
  def someaction
    ...
    buffer = StringIO.new
    book.write(buffer)
    buffer.rewind
    send_data buffer.read
  end
end