Universal Data Exporter ASP Manual

Ever wanted to convert your HTML table or recordset to the most common file formats with the press of a button?

Ever wanted to convert your HTML table or recordset to the most common file formats with the press of a button? It’s all possible with the Universal Data Exporter ASP.

Choose from Comma Separated (CSV), XML, Excel or PDF file formats and get a direct download! It's all done on the fly without the need for coding or server components!

The Basics: Exporting an HTML table

Introduction

In this tutorial we will show you how to export your HTML table to multiple formats using the Universal Data Exporter ASP.

How to do it

1. Define your site in Dreamweaver and Create a new page
Define your site in Dreamweaver and choose the option to create an ASP page, you can read more about this at this page.

You should make a page that can be uploaded to your ASP server.

2. Create your table
Create a table. From the Common toolbar, select the "create a table" icon and edit your preferences. In our case, our table will have 5 rows and 5 columns. As it's a data table we only include a table header but no cell padding or spacing as these are not supported.

Select your table and give it a name in the property inspector.

3. Add Links for Exporting your table
We make four basic links to export our table. Enter # in the link field. We enter give them the following names: "Export to CSV", "Export to Excel", "Export to PDF", "Export to XML".

Using the Universal Data Exporter
Select the links one by one and choose Behaviors -> DMXzone -> Universal Data Exporter

The Universal Data Exporter Interface appears.
Setting the General options
Select the Element ID drop down and choose the table name you've specified in step 2.

If you are using an Ajax DataGrid instead of a regular table like we made above, now there is new support for Ajax DataGrid. The Universal Data Exporter recognizes the preferences you have edited in your Ajax DataGrid and lets you select the ID of your particular grid in Element ID.

Choose the format that you want to export to in the Output options.

Enter the name of the file that will be offered when your data is exported.
You can also press the lightning bolt and choose your file name according to a column in the recordset. For example, if you have a column in you recordset with the name of "photo" and you select it as your filename, when your file is exported, it will be named "photo".

Here, you also have an option to Save Copy to the server and/or to Allow Download. Another field, under those two, asks you for the Save Location and you have the ability to choose where to save your copy to. These are available for all Output formats.
Markup for PDF
If you've chosen PDF as the output format, you'll get the following markup options:

We check the Table Header checkbox to include the column names. We leave the Font at Helvetica, leave the Size to 12, set the Color to white (#FFFFFF) and enable the Bold and Italic icons. We set the BGColor to blue (#0086be).

We leave the Font of the Table Cell at Helvetica, set the Size to 10, leave the Color at black (#000000) and leave the Bold and Italic icons disabled. We also check the Show On All Pages option to display the header on all pages.

We set the Odd Row BGColor to light grey (#CCCCCC); this way each odd row is colored grey. We leave the Row Height at 10; this value sets the height of each row. We leave the Even Row BgColor to white and the Strip HTML Tags option enabled to remove HTML codes from the content (if there are any). We leave the Line Color to black (#000000); this sets the color of the lines around your cells. We set the Line Width to 0.3; this is the thickness of the lines around your cells. We enable Page Numbers to display the numbers of the pages. Set the Alignment of the page numbers to right and the Orientation to Landscape to enable a layout that is suited for wide tables.

We enable the Title checkbox to give our PDF a name; we name our table "Car" in the Text entry field. We press the bold icon and align it to the centre. We leave the Font at Helvetica and set the Size to 16, we leave the Color to black (#000000).

You can also press the lightning bolt by the Text entry field and choose your table name according to a column in the recordset. For example, if you have a column in you recordset with the name of "photo" and you select it, when your file is exported, your table name will be "photo".

The settings above result in the following output (after pressing ok, saving and previewing in the browser).
Markup for CSV
Each output format has its own markup options. If you've chosen CSV as the Output format you'll get the following markup options;

Line Separator defines which characters are used for a line break (an enter), we'll leave it to \n. Value Separator sets the way the values are separated. We won't change this either. We will enable the Include Header checkbox to include the column names. We leave the Quote field checked to enable quotes (for example: "Richard"). We leave the Strip HTML Tags option enabled to remove HTML codes from the content (if there are any).

This results in the following output (after pressing ok, saving and previewing in the browser).

Markup for Excel
If you've chosen Excel as the output format, you'll get the following markup options:

We check the Table Header checkbox to include the column names. We leave the Font at Helvetica, and the Size to 12, set the Color to white (#FFFFFF) and enable the Bold and Italic icons. We set the BGColor to blue (#0086be). We also check the Show On All Pages option to display the header on all pages.

We leave the Font of the Table Cell at Helvetica, set the Size to 10, leave the Color at black (#000000) and leave the Bold and Italic icons disabled.

We set the Row BGColor to light grey (#DEDEDE); this way each odd row is colored grey. We leave the Row Height at 10; this value sets the height of each row. Tip: if your row heights are higher than the value set at Row Height then you need to increase the Column width for the columns that have been wrapped because they contain too much data. We leave the Line Color to black (#000000); this sets the color of the lines around your cells. We set the Line Width to 0.3; this is the thickness of the lines around your cells. We leave the Strip HTML Tags option enabled to remove HTML codes from the content (if there are any).

The settings above result in the following output (after pressing ok, saving and previewing in the browser).
Markup for XML
If you've chosen XML as the output format you'll get the following markup options:

We leave the Root name to xml and the Row name to row to apply the default xml formatting. We leave the Strip HTML Tags option enabled to remove HTML codes from the content (if there are any).

This results in the following output (after pressing ok, saving and previewing in the browser, opening the file in Dreamweaver and using Commands -> Apply Source Formatting).