[thelist] solution for large form data thingy

[Jonathan_A_McPherson at rl.gov]

Actually, it's pretty easy, assuming you have a programmatic interface to
your mailer that supports attachments. "Save" the form data to a temporary
CSV file, then attach that in an e-mail to your client and send it along.

Most Windows machines have CSV associated with Excel, so it'll open as a
spreadsheet when your client clicks on it.

The trouble with CSV is that you are sending things on a record-by-record
basis. Your client, if he wanted to make a list of submissions, would have
to manually combine the CSV's.

ORRR ...

You could append submissions to a CSV file stored on the server (CSV is
trivially easy to append to), and give your client a URL to that file so he
could get an up-to-the-second spreadsheet containing all current submissions
any time he wanted, without a database involved.

(The risk there is that you need to figure out a way to make the spreadsheet
only accessible by your client.)

HTH,
Jonathan.

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Wilson [mailto:nick at explodingnet.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 07, 2002 12:51 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] solution for large form data thingy

* and then Chris Blessing declared....
> How about a comma-separated text file that he can import into excel?  Or
> better yet, allow him to download said excel spread sheet (all you have to
> do is print the text file with an excel content-type).

Hmmmm.... not a bad idea. How do I do an excel content-type?
and how would that become a spread sheet. Seems a little to good to be
true?

- --
Nick Wilson     //  www.explodingnet.com