Often part of building a website is being able to import static data into the database. Usually the data is in csv format. Here's a quick example of how to make this work.
Files
db/teams.csv- I like to drop my data here. If its a huge file, you might want to add it to your.gitignorefile to keep it out of git.lib/tasks/import.rake- This is where we will define our rake task.
Task
require 'csv'
desc "Import teams from csv file"
task :import => [:environment] do
file = "db/teams.csv"
CSV.foreach(file, :headers => true) do |row|
Team.create {
:name => row[1],
:league => row[2],
:some_other_data => row[4]
}
end
Notes
Make sure you carefully match up the rows. Remember the array is base 0. If your file doesn't have a header row, remove set :headers to false in the foreach.
Run!
From the terminal, change to the app directory and run rake import or bundle exec rake import.
Resources
CSV library docs - http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-1.9.2/libdoc/csv/rdoc/CSV.html
Rake docs - http://rake.rubyforge.org/
David Radcliffe
Lead Developer at Trabian
Owner of Etch Development
github.com/dwradcliffe
twitter.com/dwradcliffe
david@trabian.com
