Generating Price List from MySQL Database

[matt001]

I am needing some help, I have a friend who has a e-commerce site, its running off a MySQL Database, what he would like is say at 2:00am in the morning it generates the price list in a Microsoft Excel Document from the MySQL Database so registered customers can download the latest price list.

Can people give me some information on how to start this and is their any good tutorials that can help me.

[systemdown]

There's some way you can do that directly from within an Excel spreadsheet, i.e. connect to a remote site and fetch some information to populate the cells with. Not sure of the specifics but I know it can be done.

But if you must have a stand-alone spreadsheet, you could conceivably just use whatever language you want (C/C++, Java, Perl etc.) and write a simple program or script that grabs the info from the mysql database using simple SQL statements and writes it to an ASCII file in .csv format (comma delimited) which can be opened by Excel. If this is all hosted on a *nix machine, just run a cron job that calls this app at 2:00am every day and places the Excel spreadsheet in a place it can be accessed by the web server that is serving the e-commerce site.

If you must generate .xls files though, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard, there'd be info out there on how to do it, it's just a matter of knowing the ins and outs of the file format.

Anyway there's probably an easier way of achieving what you want that I don't know about, but it shouldn't be that difficult.