Excel/Sheets copy-compatible table widget

Question

For the sake of my app's end-users, I tried to copy data from the App Maker's basic table widget to Excel and GSheets. However, this results in getting all the data in a single column in the spreadsheet.

I already noticed that this kind of copying is possible using the table chart widget. Still, I would need the basic table widget's functionalities like row click events.

Is there any way for common users to do easy exporting to Excel (while using the basic table widget)? Could this kind of copying possibility be implemented to that widget (i.e. would there be any sense in making a feature request)? Any other suggestions to make the data easily usable in other programs?

Thanks in advance!

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 18 '17 at 16:08

It is unlikely, that this will be implemented by App Maker, since basic table is fully customizable and can contain any widget and display model relations as well. It makes more sense to think about copying datasource items to clipboard or exporting them to spreadsheet. Here is a reference code, that you can try to use to generate serialized string compatible with Google Spreadsheet from datasource:

// onClick event handler for 'copy to clipboard' button
var ds = app.datasources.MyDatasource;
var items = ds.items;
var fields = ds.model.fields._values;
var serialized = '';

items.forEach(function(item) {
  var values = [];

  fields.forEach(function(field) {
    var value = item[field.name];
    var strVal = value === null ? '' : value.toString();
    values.push(strVal);
  });

  serialized += values.join('\t') + '\n';
});

// You can find how to implement copying to clipboard
// here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/400212
copyToClipboard(serialized);

Note: this code snippet will serialize ALL model fields, even if they are not present in table, but will not serialize model relations, even if there are some in your table. If you need only subset of model's fields, you can specify them explicitly:

...
var fieldNames = ['FieldA', 'FieldB', ......]; // actually fieldNames

...
  fieldNames.forEach(function(fieldName) {
  var value = item[fieldName];
....

To serialize model's relations as well you'll need to put even more efforts...

Excel/Sheets copy-compatible table widget

1 Answers1