Data exported by the Export wizard.
By default, Iron Speed Designer’s Application Wizard creates an Export Table “wizard” web page for each Show Table page. A corresponding Export button is placed on the Show Table page.
Files exported by the Export wizard are saved in ASCII comma separated value (CSV) format, one data record per file row. Only the rows in the currently selected data set are exported. This is convenient for end-users who perform a search using the Search control and wish to export only the data subset that matches the search.
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Data exported by the Export wizard. |
For the most part, the exported rows include all data fields from the database record, even if they are not visible in the table, with several caveats:
Password fields. Password fields are not exported.
Foreign key fields. Foreign key fields export two data columns, one for the foreign key value (an ID) and a second for the “display as” value, which is usually a text field. Both exported data columns have the same column heading.
Column order. The column order in the exported file is the same as the column order in the database table schema.
The exported data includes column headings in the first row of the data. This makes it easy for other application programs to import the data and for you to map the columns in the exported file to corresponding data elements in the application into which you ultimately import the file.
The column heading is a “pretty printed” version of the corresponding database field name. For example, a database field named “CompanyName” will be expanded to “Company Name”. This pretty printing is governed by a naming policy. However, you can change the column headings by changing the label text for the appropriate field in the Application Explorer, Databases folder.
The CSV file created by the Export function in your generated application has UTF-8 encoding. Excel needs Unicode formatting to properly display double byte character sets, such as Chinese characters. You can convert an exported CSV file from UTF-8 to Unicode by opening the exported file in Notepad and then saving the file in Unicode format. After saving the file in Unicode format, you can open the CSV file in Excel which will then display the appropriate double byte characters (such as Chinese characters).