Development Blog: Viget Labs

The basic use case starts with defining importers using a small internal DSL. Each importer has a name, a csv file, and a block of code that is used to process each row in the file. The row instance that is passed into the block is a fastercsv row and all of the fastercsv configuration options are available.

importer :items do
  file 'items.csv'

  foreach do |row|
    Item.create(:name => row[:name])
  end
end

Once you have created an importer, save it into a directory named importers. This directory can be located in the same directory as your Rakefile, lib/importers or app/importers. Next, pull in the simple_importer rake tasks by adding the following line to your Rakefile.

require 'simple_importer/tasks'

Now, when you do a rake -T simple_importer you'll see a rake task for each importer as well as a rake task that will run all of the importers.

Pretty simple. Although, simple_importer does have a few other neat features such as before callbacks and multiple file processing capabilities. Be sure to check out the documentation which has plenty of examples. You can grab the gem from gemcutter, or check out the code on github.