NYCPHP Meetup

[Freedman, Tom S.]

Hi all, I've been a lurker for a couple months as I've been learning PHP,
and many of your suggestions have been really helpful.  I was hoping someone
might have an idea on how to tackle an issue I haven't been able to find any
info on.

I'm currently working on a new version of a departmental intranet website.
I have a database, and offer the users a search page that lets them query it
in a variety of ways.  The new results page is not laid out in a grid, as
the old one was (we've added a lot of new fields, and the grid would be too
packed).  Some users have requested the ability to download the data for
import into Excel (they used to just copy and paste the table in).  I've
figured out how to create a .csv file, and I could, theoretically, create
one every time someone runs a query, save it in a temp directory, and
include a link to it on the webpage.  We'd have to run a cleanup routine
every night, though, to delete all these .csv's on the server.  It seems
really clumsy to me.  What I'd like to do is put a link on the result page
that, when clicked on, builds the .csv right then and offers it to the user
for download.  Is this feasible, or should I just go with the temp directory
full of reports?

Thanks in advance,
Tom