A button that exports the contents of a specified table to a CSV file. You must contain the Export Table Button in a command Form.

To provide custom content for the export, such as to provide a set of columns with more machine-friendly formatted data, you can bind this control's exportProvider property value to a separate com.webmethods.caf.faces.data.ITableContentProvider instance. An ITableContentProvider designed for CSV export is the com.webmethods.caf.faces.data.export.CSVExportProvider class. It maps the content of an existing ITableContentProvider, that is the provider that delivers the raw data for the table to a custom set of columns with each column's content specified by a binding expression.

The following example demonstrates creating a CSVExportProvider in a custom page bean method. You bind the property to the getter method, myExportProvider, to the control's exportProvider property value. There is an existing table content provider for the raw table data, accessible using the getMyExistingTableContentProvider() method. The application creates four columns: ID, Title, Priority, and Priority Name and specifies the content of these columns with binding expressions: #{row.projectId}_#{row.id}", #{row.title}, #{row.priorityValue}, and #{row.priorityName}. Specify the name of the row variable as the third argument to the CSVExportProvider constructor. For each row, the content of the ID column in the exported table generates from the value of the existing table row's projectId and id properties. The content of the Title column generates from the value of the existing table row's title property.

public ITableContentProvider getMyExportProvider() {
     ITableContentProvider existingProvider =
          getMyExistingTableContentProvider();
     Map keys = new LinkedHashMap();
     keys.put("ID", createValueBinding("#{row.projectId}_#{row.id}"));
     keys.put("Title", createValueBinding("#{row.title}"));
     keys.put("Priority", createValueBinding("#{row.priorityValue}"));
     keys.put("Priority Name", createValueBinding("#{row.priorityName}"));
     return new CSVExportProvider(existingProvider, keys, "row");
}

In the code example above, the exported table's column labels are the column keys, such as ID, Title, Priority, and Priority Name. As a best practice use the String resources from a resource bundle instead of hard-coding the labels. The labels in this example are hardcoded. The examples uses A LinkedHashMap to ensure that the columns are exported in the order they were added to the keys map. The exported CSV might look like the following:

ID, Title, Priority, Priority Name
higgins_123, Nothing Works, 1, Critical
higgins_ABC, "Name is "MWS"", 3, Medium


The export processing handles the escaping of column values such as in the example output above, the Name is "MWS" value is escaped as "Name is ""MWS""".