How to export component as excel (axlsx)

[PedroAugustoRamalhoDuarte]

Hello, in my application there are some reports that can be display in html or excel and i use view component to build the html and caxlsx to build the excel. Is there any way to render the component in another format? How i can build a custom render?

Example:

app/components
├── ...
├── example
|   ├── component.rb
|   ├── component.css
|   ├── component.html.erb
|   ├── component.xlsx.axlsx
|   └── component_controller.js
├── ...

# report.xlsx.axlsx
wb = xlsx_package.workbook

wb.add_worksheet(name: "Report") do |sheet|
  render_xlsx(Example::Component.new)
end

[boardfish]

Hey @PedroAugustoRamalhoDuarte! Interesting use case you've got here. This feels like it might be more of a question for caxlsx folk, as adding this functionality seems no different to working with a plain old Ruby object. From what I can gather there, you may need to implement #to_xlsx on your components so that they can be passed to caxlsx in this way. acts_as_xlsx has a very generic implementation that you can take some inspiration from: https://github.com/caxlsx/acts_as_caxlsx/blob/master/lib/acts_as_xlsx/ar.rb#L48

If you'd rather your axlsx logic in separate files, you could build a concern that defines to_xlsx to look for and read an xlsx.axlsx folder from __dir__, then evaluate it in the context of a new caxlsx workbook.

Hope this is helpful to you as a starting point!

[PedroAugustoRamalhoDuarte]

@boardfish Yes is a great starting point, thanks for the response!!

[boardfish]

This use case informed a little bit of a discussion I had with @allmarkedup @Spone @joelhawksley yesterday night. We recognise the importance of the pattern of having a text template stored alongside a class that's got some logic, and while ViewComponent's pretty tightly coupled to ActionView, its pattern of a class and a template is really useful in isolation. I'm particularly interested in making a gem available that makes that pattern easier somewhere down the line. Watch this space!