[RESOLVED] making a self-downloading csv file

steamPunk

I have a page in my site admin that displays client data by date, name, town etc

what my client wants is to be able to click a button that will save the query results to a file and then open a dialog to download the file and save it locally.

I can do most of that but I'm not sure how I would go about doing the downloading.

presumably when the user clicks on the "save as file" button I would create a temporary file in a directory on the server and write the csv-formated db results to that file, but then :

how do i open the dialogue asking the user where to save the file on the local machine?

how does the server know when the download has finished so it can delete the temporary file from the server ?

thanks for any help you can give with this

Weedpacket

No need for the temporary file; just output the contents of the file as the response to the user's request.

Send a header of "Content-Type:application/octet-stream" prior to doing that and the browser will just treat it like a generic file of unknown type (i.e., won't treat it like HTML, or some other format it might recognise) and it will ask the user what it should do with the thing.

Weedpacket

If you do want to use a temporary file, then using [man]tmpfile[/man] will give you a file that you can use and will be automatically deleted at the end of the script. See the example on that page for what to do next.

It still seems like an unnecessary step; I can think of one reason why it might be done, but it would still be unnecessary given the "php://output" stream.

steamPunk

Weedpacket;10894388 wrote:
No need for the temporary file; just output the contents of the file as the response to the user's request.

Send a header of "Content-Type:application/octet-stream" prior to doing that and the browser will just treat it like a generic file of unknown type (i.e., won't treat it like HTML, or some other format it might recognise) and it will ask the user what it should do with the thing.

brilliant !

why complicate things when the answer is simple (when you know how) ?!

thanks for that 🙂

steamPunk

ok I've managed to get the download thing working using an existing file on the server, with :

if(isset($_GET['dl'])){
	$SRC_FILE = "/home/user/www/path/test.txt";
	$download_size = filesize($SRC_FILE);
	$filename = basename($SRC_FILE);
	header("Pragma: public");
	header("Expires: 0");
	header("Cache-Control: private");
	header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
	header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename");
	header("Accept-Ranges: bytes");
	header("Content-Length: $download_size");
	@readfile($SRC_FILE);
}

but I can't find how to output directly the sql results as octet stream :

if(isset($_GET['dl'])){

    // use the sql in the session to get results
   $resultArray = selectQuery($conn,$_SESSION['selectSql']);

   $outputStr = "";

   for(){
       // format $resultArray as a string to output
       $outputStr .= "etc\n";
    }


    // how do i change the following to output my $outputStr
    // instead of an existing file on the server ?? :

$SRC_FILE = "/home/user/www/path/test.txt";
$download_size = filesize($SRC_FILE);
$filename = basename($SRC_FILE);
header("Pragma: public");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: private");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$filename");
header("Accept-Ranges: bytes");
header("Content-Length: $download_size");
@readfile($SRC_FILE);
}

steamPunk

don't worry - I think i've got it - this seems to work :

	
$header = "col 1;col 2;col 3;col 4";
$data = "var 1;var 2;var 3;var 4";
header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=export.csv");
header("Pragma: no-cache");
header("Expires: 0");
print($header."\n".$data);
exit;

as usual, the answer was simpler than i thought !

bpat1434

Just as another answer to how you could do this, here's what I usually do:

$csvrows = array(
    array(
        'column 1',
        'column 2', 
        'column 3',
        'column 4',
        'column 5'
    )
);

while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result))
{
    $csvrows[] = array(
        $row['column 1'],
        $row['column 2'],
        $row['column 3'],
        $row['column 4'],
        $row['column 5']
    );
}


header('Content-Type: text/csv');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=somefile.csv');

$fp = fopen('php://output', 'w');
foreach($csvrows as $row)
{
    fputcsv($fp, $row);
}
fclose($fp);

If you wanted to change the delimiter to be a semi-colon, just add a parameter:

    fputcsv($fp, $row, ';');

May as well use the built-in functions PHP has 😉

Weedpacket

bpat1434;10894433 wrote:
Just as another answer to how you could do this, here's what I usually do:...May as well use the built-in functions PHP has 🙂

Yes, that was the "one reason" I mentioned 🙂

steamPunk

yes I saw that "php://output" thing in the manual yesterday when i was trying to figure this out but I couldn't make it work - it just kept outputting an empty page with the name of the php page itself

but that looks like a good solution and, as you say, gotta use the functions or they'll just fade away and die 🙂

thanks