Export to Excel

[jacmaes]

A group of architects doing field and statistical research on city neighborhoods came to me to create an online database that they could edit from anywhere. PW seemed like the perfect choice since it's very easy to customize the admin to fit their needs, and they are indeed quite happy.

Now, however, they'd like to have an Excel file of all the neighborhoods, one on each row, so that they can work with the data offline and produce printed documents of their research.

The PW tree is organized geographically: region > city > neighborhood. In other words, each neighborhood is a page with about 40 fields (and growing). How would you guys go about it? 

[DaveP]

Just off the top of my head, CSV files are easily read by Excel, so you could create a php file that bootstraps PW to generate a CSV file, outputting the appropriate mime-type etc.

[Martijn Geerts]

I have recently used this code to create CSV, works great.

// array, with for each row an array
$array = array(
    array('val 1 - row 1', 'val 2 - row 1', 'val 3 - row 1'),
    array('val 1 - row 2', 'val 2 - row 2', 'val 3 - row 2'),
    array('val 1 - row 3', 'val 2 - row 3', 'val 3 - row 3'),
    etc...
    );

	
$out = '';
$handle = fopen('php://temp', 'r+'); // temp read/write file-like wrapper
foreach ($array as $line) fputcsv($handle, $line, ',', '"');
rewind($handle);
while (!feof($handle)) $out .= fread($handle, 8192);
fclose($handle);
echo trim($out);

[jacmaes]

Great! Thanks guys, I'll give it a try. 

[Beluga]

There's a plugin for DataTables that exports XLS:

http://www.datatables.net/extras/tabletools/

Soma has created a module that let's you easily apply DataTables to your PW modules:

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/5364-jquery-datatables-modulejs/

[adrian]

There are other libraries, but this one is pretty powerful:

phpexcel.codeplex.com

Moved to here https://github.com/PHPOffice/PHPExcel

I have used it to generate excel files from PW. Cool thing is that it also allows you to automatically generate charts from the data.

Edited September 15, 2015 by Pete
Project has moved to Github