kyle conarro

Building a CSV import option into your application can be very helpful for getting a lot of records into your database in one step. While building out some of our recent reporting additions at Rigor, I wanted to include the option to import CSV data to help our team migrate records from one service to another.

Using Ruby’s standard CSV library makes reading CSV files a breeze. Implementing the import function in a Rails-like way, however, can be more difficult. In general, Rails controller actions look like:

def index
  @my_model = MyModel.new(params[:my_model])
  if @my_model.save
    # yay, it worked! render some success page
  else 
    # womp, render some helpful error messages
  end
end

Massaging a CSV import into a controller action of this format isn’t too terribly difficult, but it may not be completely obvious at first. For my import, I opted to lean on the ActiveModel::Model module (say that five times fast) in Rails 4 to create a model-like wrapper around the CSV import functionality.

I started by creating a class in my models directory and including the module:

class MyAwesomeImporter
  include ActiveModel::Model
end

To get the Rails model-like behavior, we have to define a few model methods:

class MyAwesomeImporter
  include ActiveModel::Model

  def persisted?
    # since this model isn't ever persisted
    # just return false
    false
  end
	
  def valid?
    # logic to determine if import is valid
  end
end

For the valid? method, define what a valid import should look like and test it there, returning true or false. For example:

def valid?
  record_attributes = read_stuff_from_csv
  import_records = record_attributes.map {|attrs| MyModel.new(attrs)}
  import_records.map(&:valid?).all?
end

With the model-y parts out of the way, now we just have to set up our model with access to the CSV file and define read_stuff_from_csv and then we can use our new class in a controller action just like we always do:

# my_awesome_importer.rb
def initialize(file)
  @file = file
end

def read_stuff_from_csv
  CSV.new(@file, headers: :first_row).each do |row|
    # do stuff with the row data
  end  
  # return some useful data for making records
end

# somewhere in my controller
def import
  @my_awesome_importer = MyAwesomeImporter.new(params[:csv_file])

  if @my_awesome_importer.save
    # let the user know the import worked
  else
    # boo, return some errors
  end
end

In addition to being easy to read and understand, using a symbolic model to wrap our import makes it easy to add helpful errors to users when an import fails. Since we included the ActiveModel::Model, adding validation errors is simple. For example, if we want to make sure the imported CSV isn’t empty, we can just add the following:

def csv_empty?
  if CSV.new(File.open(file2), headers: :first_row).to_a.empty?
    # add a helpful error message for the user
    errors.add :base, "CSV is empty"
    true
  end
end

Then we can update our valid? definition to check if the file is empty first:

def valid?
  # original validations
  return false if csv_empty? 
end

By leveraging Rails ActiveModel::Model module, we can incorporate the helpful features of a model into our simple Ruby class. When working with objects that span the MVC pattern, consider creating a model-like object to keep your controllers Railsy and keep form error-handling simple.