Professional CodeIgniter

Chapter 7: Improving the Dashboard

196

Figure 7-3

If you have a spreadsheet tool (like Numbers on the Mac or the more ubiquitous Excel), you should be

able to open the CSV file and see results similar to Figure 7 - 4.

Figure 7-4

Notice that you could go back and refine this export by sorting by certain fields, but at the end of the day

you have to ask yourself, “ Why bother? ” After all, you ’ re exporting the data in a spreadsheet - friendly

way, so any further sorting and filtering can be done in the spreadsheet.

Creating an Export Function for Products

Creating the export function for Products is going to follow pretty much the same path you took with

Categories. In fact, it ’ s very much exactly the same, except that your URLs will differ slightly, as will

your SQL query. As there aren ’ t that many differences, there ’ s no point belaboring the obvious.

Here ’ s the exportCsv() function that gets added to the MProducts model:

function exportCsv(){

$this- > load- > dbutil();

$Q = $this- > db- > query(“select * from products”);

return $this- > dbutil- > csv_from_result($Q,”,”,”\n”);

}