Use jQuery to send Excel data using AJAX

Question

I have the following function that is pulling data from a database. The ajax call is working correctly. How can I send the tab delimited data in my success function to the user? Setting the contect type to "application/vnd.ms-excel" didn't work. The alert on success shows the correctly formatted data.

     function SendToExcel() {
       $.ajax({
           type: "GET",
           url: "/Search.aspx",
           contentType: "application/vnd.ms-excel",
           dataType: "text",
           data: "{id: '" + "asdf" + "'}",
           success: function(data) {
              alert(data);
           },
           error: function (XMLHttpRequest, textStatus, errorThrown) {
              alert(XMLHttpRequest.responseText);
       }});
     }

I don't want to display the data in the browser--I want to send it to Excel.

EDIT: I found a way to do what I wanted. Instead of redirecting the users to a new page that would prompt them to save/open an Excel file, I opened the page inside a hidden iframe. That way, the users click a button, and they are prompted to save/open an Excel file. No page redirection. Is it Ajax? No, but it solves the real problem I had.

Here's the function I'm calling on the button click:

     function SendToExcel() {
        var dataString = 'type=excel' +
            '&Number=' + $('#txtNumber').val() + 
            '&Reference=' + $('#txtReference').val()

        $("#sltCTPick option").each(function (i) {
             dataString = dataString + '&Columns=' + this.value;
        });

        top.iExcelHelper.location.href = "/Reports/JobSearchResults.aspx?" + dataString;;
     }

Answer 1

AJAX is... the wrong choice. Redirect the user to a server resource that will send the data down with the proper MIME type, and let the browser figure out what to do with it.

Answer 2

Since it uses JavaScript, AJAX is bound by JavaScript's designed limitations, which includes interacting with other processes on the client's machine. In this case, it's a good thing; you wouldn't want a site to be able to automatically load an Excel document with a malicious macro in it.

If you want to display the data in the browser, you can use AJAX; otherwise, you'll want to just give a link to an Excel document and let the browser's regular download handling capabilities figure out what to do.

Answer 3

It's possible that you don't want to do this with javascript.

What I think you want to do is create a response page with the mine type application/csv then redirect the user to that page. I would probably do a window.open() since the user doesn't lose the page they're currently on.

Answer 4

I've to do something similar..
Can you please explain what you are passing in the AJAX request as your data in your first function?

If you are using the second function, then can you please explain what the foll. 3 correspond to.

'txtNumber' ,'txtReference', 'sltCTPick' ?

I've a HTML table on a JSP page that I want to export to excel. Can I use SendToExcel() function to do this?

Thanks,
Pritish

Answer 5

Very nice solution by the question raiser..