Comments on: Rails: Importing data from spreadsheets into database

By: Nithin Bekal

Nithin Bekal — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:15:28 +0000

@NealMJD. Thank you for the comment. I suppose the problem with putting the task in lib folder was because the path to images is relative to the root folder.

By: NealJMD

NealJMD — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:16:22 +0000

I just want to add a note that I discovered when I was using this tutorial to set up my rake task. I needed to create entries in a database each of which with an image. I'm using paperclip by thoughtbot for image storage so I did this -

FasterCSV.foreach("product_categories.csv") do |row|
      puts row[0]
      puts row[1]
      ProductCategory.create(
                 :name => row[0].to_s,
                 :main_image => File.open(row[1].to_s)
               )
end

I ended up putting in those puts just to give a little more info when the task is run. Additionally I had to put my product_categories.csv file in the root directory of my app. Anyway this post saved me a ton of time, thanks for writing it!

By: Nithin Bekal

Nithin Bekal — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:35:40 +0000

@anon. Thanks. :)

By: anon

anon — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:40:09 +0000

awesome tutorial. worked like a charm; way easier than most of the other tutorials I’ve seen out there for this kinda stuff.

By: Nithin Bekal

Nithin Bekal — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:30:40 +0000

@gnitmada. Put it in the lib/tasks directory.

By: gnitmada

gnitmada — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:35:43 +0000

What rails directory does the file need to be put in?

By: Nithin Bekal

Nithin Bekal — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:44:04 +0000

@Josh. Thanks. :)

By: Josh P

Josh P — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:08:05 +0000

And BTW Nithin, great little tutorial, worked perfectly :)

By: Josh P

Josh P — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:05:49 +0000

Hey Mark,

Just thought I would chime as I was in your boots only a few weeks ago. In ROR models are *somewhat* similar to tables.

It sounds like you need a good introduction to ROR before you try importing csv data. The best *intro* ROR book I read was:

Simply Rails by Patrick Lenz

Check it out and good luck.

Josh

By: Nithin Bekal

Nithin Bekal — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 04:30:47 +0000

Hi Mark. Do you have a model associated with the people table? If you do, then you'll have a file in the app/models directory called people with something like this:


class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  # associations and validations described here.
end

This rake will only work if you already have a model. If you are importing the data into a rails application, it seems logical that you create the model first and then do the importing. Btw, what error did you get when you ran the rake task?