Joomla SQL 2 Excel Replacement

Joomla SQL 2 Excel Replacement

Some months ago, almost a year I think there used to be a really ripping piece of software called SQL2Excel that was provided by Joomla R Us. It appears that this site has been down for a while, so I decided I would try to come up with a replacement that gets around some of the limitations.

SQL2Excel, allthough a great product, lacked the ability to handle large datasets. I am sure that some readers may be familiar with issues opening the generated excel files because of a hard truncation of the data due to processing limits exceeded on the server, or timeout by the browser, or server or some combination.

What is actually happening here is that the server is actually killing the connection, or if the server process lifetime is increased, the browser is killing the connection. This is to aid in keeping responsive systems and to prevent the ability of malicious users to open connections and hold them open for an indiscriminate amount of time to perform a DOS attack. The specific details of this are not necessarily 100% accurate, but one could see the potential issue if there were no limit, especially if there was a runaway process that doesn’t come back.

I have devised a way to break up the calls to excel and format them into a json style formatting that is easily parsed and still protected via password. The technique is actually programmed into an excel addin, that when installed adds an additional ribbon which when clicked allows the user to log in, and peruse the database tables, and export the tables to excel. At this point, there is no joining or direct sql, and there is hope that I will be able to add syncing to the mix. Also, there is a joomla component to install, or things simply won’t work.

If you are interested in this technology, since this is pretty much alpha software at this point with no necessarily big chance at Beta or Release unless there is interest.

email: ttessier at swhistlesoft.com if you are interested in this project.

Copy the excel files into:

C:\Users\ttessier\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\AddIns

Create Folder:

C:\Users\ttessier\AppData\Roaming\JoomlaSync

Create xml file Settings.xml:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><root><host>example.com</host><base></base></root>

Swhistle Soft Downloads: SQL2Excel Sync

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3 Responses to Joomla SQL 2 Excel Replacement

  1. Leonardo Cordero says:

    I’m very interested in this component because I need export data from a metereological database in a governmental Web portal (www.platicar.go.cr) to CSV or MS Excel format for further manipulation, sadly SQL2Excel is no more available in Internet.

    There are any possibility that this project become a production stage? Thanks in advance for your kindness help.

    • ttessier ttessier says:

      Yes there are: I need to know what direction to take in terms of making a tangible product and to decide to keep it open source or not.

      Currently this project allows you to grab everything from one table, but for starters – I believe that a direct query would need to be able to be specified in order to better suit most needs. In order to do that – I believe that I would need to parse the query and convert it into json – skip the constants – and rebuild the query on the other side.

      In addition to the above statements – I believe that small helper programs that can run client side are almost 100% essential. But, I believe that once these tasks are complete, that it should be rather easy to port to other frameworks ( wordpress, drupal ) and other languages ( perl, ruby, python ). Currently the functionality inside a joomla component which locked to version 2.5.

    • Dear all,
      just in case you overlooked this, we already created a fork component (called jDBexport) based on SQL2Excel and published it more than a year ago on the JOOMLA extension directory.
      we are currently busy creating a completely rewritten JOOMLA 3.x version of this component including support for XLSX files and other features.
      Regards
      Ruediger Schultz
      Schultz IT Solutions

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