Comment on data export (csv, xls, ...)

klint.istvud

Hi,

First of all I'll like to thank you for this great plugin.
I've searched and tested few other similar plugins for table manipulation
and I must say DataTables beats them all.
It has more features and far more better support :)
Just keep up the good work and donations will rise uniformly :)

And now back to my question/comment...

Why did you use flash player for saving to csv, xls in TableTools plugin?
Is there any other way to save csv/xls without the usage of flash player?

allan

Hi klint.istvud,

Thanks for the kind words about DataTables :-)

The Flash player is used for saving files in TableTools since there is no method present in Javascript to access the local storage on a computer. This is changing with HTML 5, but at the moment you can't just say "save this string to file x.txt", but you can with Flash 10 (indeed this is new in Flash 10).

I wanted to keep the processing for TableTools on the client-side to make the installation as simple as possible, hence my decision to go with Flash.

If you want to remove the requirement for Flash, then what you can do is shunt the data which is sent to the Flash instance to a server-side script which will create a file with a MIME type that will prompt the browser to download and save the file, rather than just display it.

Hope this explains the decision!

Regards,
Allan