> I have a table populated by a php/mysql script. I've created an excel export > option which changes the header to ms-excel and refreshes the current page > by making another call to the mysql db to fetch the data. > So I thought, the table data is already embedded in the current html page; > why make another call to the mysql db to fetch the same data again? is not > possible to use javascript to scan the current html page for <table> and > </table> and create an excel file on the fly therefore saving bandwith ?
Yes, it's possible - I do it all the time. The benefit of this approach is that if you allow client-side sorting, filtering, column hiding, etc, the user can download exactly what they see because the manipulated client-side table is exactly what they want. The problem is it can't be done _purely_ client-side, because there is no way for js to generate a document of a specific mime type. Because of this, you need to write a simple server-side component in your language of choice that accepts a form value containing content to echo back. It slaps the excel mime type on it and returns it as-is, and the user's browser (hopefully) opens excel to handle the response. My solution is for an IE-only webapp, so the code isn't very cross-browser, but I suppose you could generalize the approach. I do these steps: 1) Get the outerHTML of the table 2) Create a hidden iframe and write out the table as part of it 3) Get a reference to the new table and manipulate it using standard dom to clean it into something that excel will like. For example, a) Convert text inputs into plain text b) Convert checkboxes into an "X" if checked, else blank c) Convert select lists into their selected option's visible text d) Convert links to plain text e) Replace images with their [alt] text f) Make sure borders are on g) Put nowrap on every cell h) etc... 4) Get the outerHTML of the resulting table and set it into a textarea in the iframe 5) Submit the iframe form to the server, which echoes back the submitted content with the excel mime type It all happens very quickly and the resulting Excel output matches exactly to what the user sees on screen. Depending on your data, you may need to scrub your tables more to get dates in the right formats that excel will parse correctly or to remove other markup that will ugly up the excel. Once written, though, it becomes pretty reusable on almost any table with very good results. With the power of jQuery, I imagine that 'cleaning' the table would be extremely trivial and the resulting js file would be pretty small. I would add it to my general table library (which I'm going to release as a jQuery plugin soon) but since it requires a server-side component I think it needs to be separate. Hope that helps! Matt _______________________________________________ jQuery mailing list [email protected] http://jquery.com/discuss/
