Download several excel files with one click - php

Question

I have several php files which contain different queries to a postgresql database. There about sixteen of these files. Each of these files returns a different set of data based on the query within the file. After a query is made, you can download the file and the download is into an excel file.
My question is how can i trigger a download in php such that i can have just one link and upon clicking it, all these sixteen files are downloaded at once. I dont want to download each file on its on. Or better still i could have checkboxes and i select the files i would like to download. I hope my question is clear enough.
For example i have this file named export_a.php with this code
<?php require_once('connections/pgconn.php');
function cleanData(&$str)
{
$str = preg_replace("/\t/", "\\t", $str);
$str = preg_replace("/\r?\n/", "\\n", $str);
if(strstr($str, '"')) $str = '"' . str_replace('"', '""', $str) . '"';
}
// filename for download
$filename = "eastafrica_revenue_daily" . date('Ymd') . ".xls";
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$filename\"");
header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
$flag = false;
$result = pg_query("SELECT to_char (a.CALLDATE,'yyyymmdd') as transdate,
sum(a.alltaxcost::integer) AS revenue,
COUNT (DISTINCT a.IDENTIFIANT) AS distinct_callers,
a.zoneiddest as country_code,b.country
FROM cdr_data a, COUNTRY_CODES b
WHERE a.CALLSUBCLASS = '002'
AND a.CALLCLASS = '008'
and a.zoneiddest::integer > 0
AND SUBSTR (a.CALLEDNUMBER, 1, 2) NOT IN
('77', '78', '75', '70', '71', '41', '31', '39', '76','79')
and substr(a.zoneiddest,1,3) in ('254','255','211','257','250')
and trim(a.zoneiddest) = trim(b.country_code)
GROUP BY to_char (a.CALLDATE,'yyyymmdd') ,a.zoneiddest,b.country
ORDER BY 1") or die('Query failed!');
while(false !== ($row = pg_fetch_assoc($result))) {
if(!$flag) {
// display field/column names as first row
echo implode("\t", array_keys($row)) . "\r\n";
$flag = true;
}
array_walk($row, 'cleanData');
echo implode("\t", array_values($row)) . "\r\n";
}
exit;
?>
Then i have another file say export_b.php with another query. When a link is clicked on a certain page say a.php where this query is made, it exports to excel.
My question is how can i trigger a download in php such that i can have just one link and upon clicking it, all these sixteen files are downloaded at once. I dont want to download each file on its on. Or better still i could have checkboxes and i select the files i would like to download.

Answer 1

If you want to download Excel files, why not download a single Excel file containing 16 worksheets (one for each of your datasets);
Alternatively zip all the files together, and download the zip