CSV Exports in Rails

If you're looking for an elegant way to generate CSV files from your index views (or search views or anything else for that matter) you should look no further than this post on StackOverflow by rwc9u.

The gist is to add a format line in the respond_to section of the index method in your controller that caters to CSV.  Then create an index.csv.erb file where you can generate the actual CSV using inline ruby like you would for e.g. your index.html.erb view.  Actually retrieving the data in CSV format from your application involves adding a ".csv" extension to the end of your normal index path e.g. /test/widgets becomes /test/widgets.csv to return CSV.

Keep in mind that you'll need to restart your rails server if you create the initializer file that he suggests.