[Seaside] Generate Excel documents from Seaside (Pharo)

[Johan Brichau]

Hi there,

Another option is to serve a plain html table from your web app and use Excel webqueries [1] to pull in the data from Excell. You can serve a (static) excel file with the webquery embedded and have it pull in the data rather than trying to generate an excel yourself.

We also had the best results generating spreadsheetML (which is the solution Tobias proposes).

If you serve csv, be aware that excell does not treat this very well on all platforms. We tried all that a couple of years ago and finally found that only a CSV in UTF16 format which uses tabs as separator (not commas) is read by excell on all platforms [2,3]

Also, the trick to just put the extension ‘xls’ to a csv file only works if the mime type was defined on the client computer. It does not work everywhere and can break at any time.

cheers,
Johan

[1] http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/get-and-analyze-data-from-the-web-in-excel-HA001054848.aspx
[2] http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2009/09/exporting-data-to-csv-and-excel-in-your-rails-app/
[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6588068/which-encoding-opens-csv-files-correctly-with-excel-on-both-mac-and-windows

>> On 31.01.2014, at 16:10, Esteban A. Maringolo <emaringolo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> I need to download the contents of a html table generated with Seaside as a file (actually the whole contents if the table is paginated).
>>> 
>>> I wonder if somebody already implemented the feature to generate an Excel file programatically?
>>> 
>>> I'm using CSV files, but the customer prefers Excel (it can be XLSX).
>>> 
>>> Any thoughts? Command line converters? (linux)

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