[Resolved] [Resolved] [Resolved] [Resolved] Downloadable CSV

aaron_karp

I'm pulling a lot of data from mysql and spitting it out onto a webpage, and I want to add a link at the top of the page that says "Download in CSV format"

Ideally, I'd like that link to just pop up a little Download dialogue box. But sometimes there is a huge amount of data on the page, so I don't want to write a CSV every time the page loads.

Does anyone have any suggestions to workarounds for this? Maybe direct the user to another page that generates a CSV on the server and then, once it's been generated, redirects the user to the .csv file? Would that work?

AstroTeg

I wouldn't go with trying to build the CSV file each time you load the page. I'd recommend doing what you had already suggested which is place another link and toss the CSV generating code in another file. Have that script call the right headers to trigger the browser to download the file and then just echo the data out to the browser (no need to save the file to disk unless you have some other plans for the file or wish to get into caching).

For the stuff I do with CSV, I kind of prefer this approach with the headers:

header('Content-type: application/ms-excel');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=YourFileNameHere.csv"');

Then after that code, run your query code and echo out the CSV formatted data.

Now if it takes a while to process this, I might recommend setting up a background process. A user clicks the link and launches the background PHP process. The background process would build the CSV file (saved to disk) and if you like, compress it, then you could email it as an attachment. The beauty is you can immediately let your user know they will receive an email with the data, but it'll take a few minutes to process. Then the user can go off and do whatever they like and check their email later on. I've done this and it works out great. This is pretty fancy though and might be more involved than you would want. But its an idea.

aaron_karp

Thanks. That's very useful and the email idea is fantastic. I have no idea how the background process thing works, so I'll have to look into that.

First I'll try it the other way.

Thanks again.

aaron_karp

Turns out it doesn't take too long to generate the CSV. It works nicely the way you recommended when I click Save (on the download file dialogue box) using IE6:

header('Content-type: application/ms-excel'); 
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=' . $reportname . '.csv"');

But here are the problems:

Using IE6, if I click "open" and excel is not already running, I get an error from excel as the program starts up, like: 'C:\Documents at settings.......filename.csv' cannot be found. Check the spelling, blah blah.

If excel is already running, there's no problem clicking "open." 'Save' works unconditionally in IE.

In Mozilla (firefox), it doesn't work at all. Clicking the link to my CSV generating script results in an error popup (not from excel, but from the browser). "C:.....tempfilename.csv could not be save because an unknown error occurred."

Anyone have any suggesstions? Thanks.

aaron_karp

Got it: gotta be a little more specific and tend to IE's pickiness.

header('Content-Type: text/x-csv');
// IE need specific header (to show the correct name of downloading file)
// grabbed from phpMyAdmin...
if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE')) {
	header('Content-Disposition: inline; filename="' . $reportname . '"');
	header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
	header('Pragma: public');
} else {
	header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="' . $reportname . '"');
	header('Pragma: no-cache');
}