Datatables / TableTools: format data as text when exporting to Excel

Question

I am using the Datatables TableTools plugin in order to provide an Export to Excel option for a table on my page.

In general everything works as intended. My only issue is that I would need all the data resp. the columns in the resulting Excel table being formatted as text as otherwise I am losing data in some columns.

Examples: - I have a column that has leading zeros (e.g. 0022) which only appears with the leading zeros cut off (e.g. 22) in the Excel file if this is not formatted as text. - Another column contains 19-digit account numbers (e.g. 1234567890123456789) which appears with the last four digits being changed to zeros (e.g. 1234567890123450000) in the Excel file if this is not formatted as text.

Is there any way I can set this in my Datatables / TableTools initialisation so that it always exports all data as text into the Excel file ?

Many thanks for any help with this, Tim.

Answer 1

I tried the first option given by Aureltime but I found a little side effect. If the column only contains numbers and you use the render function, the sorting option doesn't work. Hopefully, from 1.10.12 datatables version there is a new option to customize data before creating the excel file.

In this customize function I added the /u002C and it works perfect, even the sorting of numbers.

        "buttons": [{
            extend: 'excel',
            exportOptions: {
                orthogonal: 'sort'
            },
            customizeData: function ( data ) {
                for (var i=0; i<data.body.length; i++){
                    for (var j=0; j<data.body[i].length; j++ ){
                        data.body[i][j] = '\u200C' + data.body[i][j];
                    }
                }
            }               
            }],