mysql query to excel - php

Question

Community,
I am currently working on a report builder. The objective of the report builder is to send out an email with an excel document with weekly information coming from an sql table. It is activated when the first person logs in for the day on Monday. If Monday is a holiday, and no one logs in that day, a timestamp will not be made in the database. When the user logs in Tuesday, it looks at the last timestamp to see if one was placed for the previous day. if not, it will fire on tuesday.
The first step in this process looks like this...
$today = cal_to_jd(CAL_GREGORIAN,date("m"),date("d"),date("Y"));
$yesterday = date('Y-m-d', strtotime($date .' -1 day'));
$holiday = false;
if(jddayofweek($today,1) == 'Tuesday')
{
if(mysql_num_rows(mysql_query("select report_date from report_builder where report_date = '{$yesterday}'")) == 0)
{
$holiday = true;
}
}
if(jddayofweek($today,1) == 'Monday' || $holiday === true)
{
$today = mysql_query("select report_date from report_builder where report_date = CURDATE()");
if(mysql_num_rows($today) == 0)
{
$date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s',time()-(7*86400));
mysql_query("INSERT into report_builder (report_date) VALUES (CURDATE())");
//More code here
**The question for this particular post is as follows:
Is it possible to send the information to a csv file that does not actually open so the user can see, but instead be saved to a temporary file? Can this be done in a way where it doesn't send the background html?**
Once this is accomplished, I wanted to send the file to a user using my current code that looks like this...
require("class.phpmailer.php");
$mail = new PHPMailer();
$mail->From = "**********";
$mail->AddAddress("*************");
$mail->Subject = "Test";
$mail->Body = "HI";
$fileName = $_FILES['file']['name'];
$tmpName = $_FILES['file']['tmp_name'];
$fileName = addslashes($fileName);
echo $fileName;
$mail->AddAttachment("temporary file path");
if(!$mail->Send())
{
echo 'Message was not sent.';
echo 'Mailer error:'.$mail->ErrorInfo;
}

Answer 1

Yes you can certainly write a files to disk and save it in any number of ways. I will however point you to something that might be a quick way to save some steps (i.e. not have to create a file in PHP) if you application server and your MySQL are on the same physical host. This is of course assuming that a CSV file would be suitable (i.e. you don't actually need to use a PHP Excel library to build an XLS or XLSX file)
SELECT [fields] INTO OUTFILE '/path/to/file'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
FROM your_table;
This will directly create a CSV at location path/to/file on the machine which can then be sent via PHP. Please note that the file name must not be an existing file name as this approach will not allow you to overwrite an existing file.
If your MySQL host is remote or you need to manipualte the data before writing to file, I would suggest looking at fputcsv() (http://php.net/manual/en/function.fputcsv.php) in order to write the data from your query directly to a file in CSV format.
$file = fopen('/path/to/file.csv', 'w');
while ($row = [YOUR DATABASE FETCH HERE]) {
fputcsv($file, $row);
}