Item9132: Enhance to allow multiple tables

As reported here (an email thread I guess), the plugin is hobbled by being able to work with only one table. The original reporter has enhanced the plugin (diffs in the thread) to support multiple tables.

Currently only a single table can be exported from within a topic: the first one after the first '%TABLE2EXCEL{}%' macro. If other '%TABLE2EXCEL{}%' macros are added they also export the same table.

I changed this to allow any number of tables within a topic to be exported. To achieve this I added the new parameter 'number'. This parameter provides the plugin with the information where to start looking for the table: after macro number 'number'.

Currently it is just looked for the first occurence of the string 'table2excel' and then the next table is exported. In my patched version the number of occurences of the 'table2excel' string is counted and only when it matches 'number' the first table after that is exported. Default number is '1'.

Example:
%TABLE2EXCEL{number="1"...}%
...table 1...
%TABLE2EXCEL{number="2"...}%
...table 2...
%TABLE2EXCEL{number="3"...}%
...table 3...

I added another parameter 'label' to customize the label of the export button and set the default text to:

Export the table below in Excel format

I also added the same parameter 'label' to the 'excel2table' macro for customizing the text describing the data source for the automatically generated table. And I expanded the default text to the following to assist non-expert wiki users:

The table above was generated automatically from the attached file 'example.xls' and cannot be edited directly.
Update the attached file to update the table.

The filename can be added (several times) as the variable '${file}' into the label text. (The braces are added to enhance parsing security, adapted from Perl.)

All the credit should go to the original reporter. I'm just putting this here for tracking.

-- BigBaaadBob - 09 Jun 2010

Commenting is disabled while not logged in