Can I add a button to a CFGRID that lets a user export the grid to an XLSX file? How?

Question

I'm a coldfusion developer working on a reporting application to display information from a CFSTOREDPROC process. I've been able to get the data from my query to display correctly in a CFGRID, and I'm really happy with the display of the data. The grid saves a lot of time because it avoids using the CFOUTPUT tag and formatting the data in HTML for hundreds of reports.

All I would like to do is add a simple Disk Icon somewhere on the datagrid control that would save the contents of the datagrid and export it into an XLSX(2010) file that an end user could then manipulate in a spreadsheet program. This is important because the data needs to have a 'snapshot' at certain times of year saved.

Solutions Tried: I looked into having a link from the report options page that would fire into a report_xls.cfm page but designing a page that catches all of the report options a second time seems dumb and would add thousands of CFM's to the website.

CFSPREADSHEET seems not to work for a variety of reasons. One is that the server seems to constantly fight me with the 'write' function in this tag. Another is that I don't know how to make the javascript work for this button to get the output that I want.

I also looked into doing this as a Javascript button that would fire based on the data entered. Although the data from a CFSTOREDPROC will display correctly if I use a CFOUTPUT block, CFGRID seems to have a hard time with all output styles except HTML. This has caused some difficulty with these solutions because the application doesn't spit out a neat HTML table but instead sends a javascript page section.

Answer 1

Raymond Camden's blog contains an entry Exporting from CFGRID that we used in our project.

The example in the article exports to PDF, but it is rather simple to modify the download.cfm file to export to Excel files as well:

1. You modify the file to generate the <table>...</table> HTML from his example in a <cfsavecontent variable="exportList"> tag, so that the #exportList# variable contains the table that will be shown in the spreadsheet.
2. Next we have a URL parameter mode that determines whether it is exported to PDF or Excel.

So the end of our download.cfm looks like the following:

<cfif url.mode EQ "PDF">
  <cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="inline; filename=report.pdf">
  <cfdocument format="pdf" orientation="landscape">    
    <cfoutput>#exportList#</cfoutput>
  </cfdocument>
<cfelse>
  <cfcontent type="application/vnd.ms-excel">
  <cfheader name="Content-Disposition" value="report.xls">
  <cfoutput>#exportList#</cfoutput>
</cfif>