to_google_spreadsheet

to_google_spreadsheet makes it trivial to populate a Google spreadsheet with an Array of Ruby objects.

# Adds the users Bob and John to the default spreadsheet in the worksheet Employees
[{:name => "Bob", :age => 26}, {:name => "John", :age => 28}].to_google_spreadsheet("Employees")

Results in:

Image of Google spreadsheets result once running above command

You could also use this within Rails like so:

Account.all.to_google_spreadsheet("Accounts")

Usage

Installation

$ gem install to_google_spreadsheet

Setup

You must provide your Google Docs credentials, optionally you can supply a default spreadsheet to use:

GoogleSpreadsheet.config do |c|
  c.email               = "[email protected]"
  c.password            = "seekrit"

  # optional, see note below on how to obtain a spreadsheet key
  c.default_spreadsheet = "spreadsheet_key"
end

Obtaining your spreadsheet key

The spreadsheet key is found in the URL when visiting the spreadsheet:

Image showing how the key is found in the URL in Google Docs

Usage

#to_google_spreadsheet is simply a method defined on Enumerable, thus any subclasses hereof should work with to_google_spreadsheet as expected (e.g. Arrays). Enumerable#to_google_spreadsheet takes two arguments:

module Enumerable
  def to_google_spreadsheet(worksheet, spreadsheet = GoogleSpreadsheet::Config.default_spreadsheet)
    session = GoogleSpreadsheet.(GoogleSpreadsheet::Config.email, 
                                      GoogleSpreadsheet::Config.password)
    spreadsheet = session.spreadsheet_by_key(spreadsheet)
    ws = spreadsheet.find_or_create_worksheet_by_name(worksheet)
    ws.set_header_columns(self.first)
    ws.populate(self)
    ws.save
  end
end

The first argument being the name of the worksheet within the spreadsheet, e.g. "Accounts", if it doesn't already exist, it will be created. The second, optional, argument is the spreadsheet key (see Obtaining your spreadsheet key above), if it is not supplied, the default spreadsheet, defined by in the configuration will be used.

Examples

# Configure
GoogleSpreadsheet.config do |c|
  c.email               = "[email protected]"
  c.password            = "seekrit"

  # optional, see note below on how to obtain a spreadsheet key
  c.default_spreadsheet = "spreadsheet_key"
end

# Populates the worksheet "Employees" in the default spreadsheet 
# with two employees
[
  {:name => "Bob", :age => 26}, 
  {:name => "John", :age => 28}
].to_google_spreadsheet("Employees")

# Populates the worksheet "Signups" in the nondefault spreadsheet 
# with two signup dates
[
  {:date => "18/7/2011", :signups => 28},
  {:date => "19/7/2011", :signups => 33}
].to_google_spreadsheet("Signups", "other_spreadsheet_key")

# Populates the worksheet "Accounts" in the default spreadsheet 
# with all # accounts in the database
Account.all.to_google_spreadsheet("Accounts")

Supported objects

assert array.all? {|e| [OpenStruct,Hash,ActiveRecord::Base].any? { |type| e.kind_of?(type) }}

I.e. anything that is #kind_of? Hash, an OpenStruct or an ActiveRecord model. It is easy to add support for additional types.

License

to_google_spreadsheet is released under the MIT license.