Download a file with an ajax call

Question

I am using PHPExcel to read an excel template, populate the data, and ask the user to download the file.

generate_excel.php

$objPHPExcel = PHPExcel_I         


        

Answer 1

Not everything should be done with AJAX. Sometimes plain old HTML is more suitable for a job. I guess your button has a tag? Why won't you do something like this

<a href="generate_excel.php" target="_blank">Export to Excel</a>

in your HTML? Note the target="_blank" part. It's there to make sure your page is not reloaded.

For input you can use construct

<form action="generate_excel.php" target="_blank"><input type="button">...whatever</form>

Answer 2

Found a way to do this, although I'm not sure if this is an ideal approach.

I added a hidden iframe in the page. When the ajax call returns, it returns the url of the created data. I used javascript to redirect the iframe to that url which automatically triggers the download action.

Answer 3

I don't think you can download anything by ajax call. Instead of you can generate and save the excel in server (temporary) and show the download link to the user.

Answer 4

I looked for ways to pass JSON data with ajax to PHP and return an excel file (MySQL and PHPExcel) for the user to save. I looked around and put some pieces together, hope it can help someone:

jQuery:

$("#exportBotton").on("click",function(event) {
event.preventDefault();
// create json object;
str_json = JSON.stringify({"key01":val01, "key02":val02, "key03":val03});
        $.ajax({
              type: "post",
              data: str_json,
              url: "../../includes/dbSelect_agentFormExport.php",
              dataType: "json",
              success: function(output){
                          // output returned value from PHP t
              document.location.href =(output.url);
            }
       });
});

PHP:

 $str_json = file_get_contents('php://input');
 $objPHPExcel = new PHPExcel();
 // here i populated objPHPExcel with mysql query result.....

 function saveExcelToLocalFile($objWriter){
    // make sure you have permission to write to directory
    $filePath = '../tmp/saved_File.xlsx';
    $objWriter->save($filePath);
    return $filePath;
}

 $objWriter = new PHPExcel_Writer_Excel2007($objPHPExcel);
 $response = array(
     'success' => true,
     'url' => saveExcelToLocalFile($objWriter)
 );
 echo json_encode($response);
 exit();

Answer 5

You can try this way:

1. Send a Jquery AJAX POST request with the data that is to be used to generate excel report, and store that data in a session variable. Return an arbitrary string like 'success' as the response.
2. If the output of the above AJAX call is 'success', then do a GET request to another URL in your application, that reads the data from session (stored in the first step, else throw an error), prepares an excel file out of that data, and forces the download of that excel file to the browser.