Issues Creating and Downloading File in IE from PHP

Took a while to fix this one. The problem is you create a download button in HTML that leads to a PHP program that creates a file that Internet Explorer should download. The code works fine in Firefox just not IE.

The original code was something like:
{code type=php}
header(“Pragma: no-cache”);
header(“Expires: 0″);

header(“Content-disposition: attachment; filename=\”export.xls\”;”);
header(“Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel”);
{/code}
Which works in Firefox but not IE. The new code is:
{code type=php}header(“Pragma: “);
header(“Cache-Control: “);

header(“Content-disposition: attachment; filename=\”export.xls\”;”);
header(“Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel”);
{/code}
And that works fine.

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PHP UTF-8 and simplexml

Recently the page checking code was breaking when used on a site. The XML returned from the supplier was being read using file_get_contents() and passed straight into simplexml_load_string() which was then kicking out a UTF-8 Encoding Error.

The way around this is to use utf8_encode() to ensure the string is encoded into UTF-8 before passing to simplexml_load_string(). In this instance my code goes like:

{code type=php}
$FileContents = file_get_contents( $URL ) ;
if ( $FileContents !== false )
{
   $xml  = simplexml_load_string( utf8_encode( $FileContents ) ) ;
}
{/code}

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jQuery – Add a default button to a page

Normally in HTML you can add a ‘input type=”submit”‘ to a page and it acts as a default button. However this only works if the input tag is within a ‘form’. I was using AJAX and found that adding a form caused the AJAX to fail. Instead I ended up with the following code:

$(‘input’).keyup(function(e) {
//alert(e.keyCode);
if(e.keyCode == 13) {
$(‘#btnSubmit’).click() ;
}
});

This adds to all input fields a keyup function that checks for the enter key and if found calls the click function on the button I want to use as the default button – in this case it’s an input button called ‘btnSubmit’.

Posted in jQuery, Programming | 1 Comment »

jQuery Automatic Trim of Input Fields

Really common task with a really easy solution

$(function()
{
$(“input”).change( function() { $(this).attr(“value”, $.trim( $(this).attr(“value”) ) ) });
});

This attaches a function to the ‘change’ event of all <input> tags. When the input field is changed it uses the built in ‘trim()’ function of jquery to trim off whitespace.

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Save HTML Table to Excel using jQuery

After a few hours work looking into this, this turned out really easy to implement using jQuery and server side PHP programming as follows:

On the client side the following HTML code needs adding to the page (note this is older code – for newer code follow link at bottom):

<form action="/SaveToExcel.php" method="post" target="_blank"
onsubmit='$("#datatodisplay").val( $("&lt;div&gt;").append( $("#ReportTable").eq(0).clone() ).html() )'>
<input  type="image" src="/images/icons/Floppy-48x48.png" width="12" height="12" >
<input type="hidden" id="datatodisplay" name="datatodisplay" />
</form>

Note – variables used above – ReportTable is the id of the table you want to save and datatodisplay is a hidden variable used to post the table to the server.

The jQuery commands were added to the form’s onsubmit event but could easily be in your $(function(){}); fuction

The hard part here was getting all of the <table> HTML code. The standard jQuery .html() command gets the innerHTML and was cutting off the <table> HTML code. Getting all the HTML code was accomplished using the code $(“#datatodisplay”).val( $(“<div>”).append( $(“#ReportTable”).eq(0).clone() ).html() ) which effectively gets the outerHTML of the named HTML object (in this case the table we want to save to excel).

On the server side create a file called’SaveToExcel.php’ and add the following code:

<?php
header("Content-type: application/vnd.ms-excel; name='excel'");

header("Content-Disposition: filename=export.xls");
// Fix for crappy IE bug in download.
header("Pragma: ");
header("Cache-Control: ");
?>
<html>
<head></head>
<body><?=$_REQUEST['datatodisplay']?>
</body>
</html>

Updated: April 8, 2010 – modified to add fix for crappy IE download bug.
Update: September 11, 2011 – new version of jquery save to excel javascript code at http://www.topsemtips.com/2011/09/jquery-save-to-excel-ii/

Posted in Accessibility, jQuery | 40 Comments »