How to save .xlsx data to file as a blob

Question

I have a similar question to this question(Javascript: Exporting large text/csv file crashes Google Chrome):

I am trying to save the data created by excelbuilder.js's EB.createFile() function. If I put the file data as the href attribute value of a link, it works. However, when data is big, it crashes Chrome browser. Codes are like this:

//generate a temp <a /> tag
var link = document.createElement("a");
link.href = 'data:application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet;base64,' + encodeURIComponent(data);
link.style = "visibility:hidden";
link.download = fileName;

document.body.appendChild(link);
link.click();
document.body.removeChild(link);

My codes to create the data using excelbuilder.js is like follows:

var artistWorkbook = EB.createWorkbook();
var albumList = artistWorkbook.createWorksheet({name: 'Album List'});

albumList.setData(originalData); 

artistWorkbook.addWorksheet(albumList);

var data = EB.createFile(artistWorkbook);

As suggested by the answer of the similar question (Javascript: Exporting large text/csv file crashes Google Chrome), a blob needs to be created.

My problem is, what is saved in the file isn't a valid Excel file that can be opened by Excel. The codes that I use to save the blob is like this:

var blob = new Blob(
    [data],
    {type: "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet;base64,"}
);

// Programatically create a link and click it:
var a = document.createElement("a");
a.href = URL.createObjectURL(blob);
a.download = fileName;
a.click();

If I replace the [data] in the above codes with [Base64.decode(data)], the contents in the file saved looks more like the expected excel data, but still cannot be opened by Excel.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I had the same problem as you. It turns out you need to convert the Excel data file to an ArrayBuffer.

var blob = new Blob([s2ab(atob(data))], {
    type: ''
});

href = URL.createObjectURL(blob);

The s2ab (string to array buffer) method (which I got from https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/blob/master/README.md) is:

function s2ab(s) {
  var buf = new ArrayBuffer(s.length);
  var view = new Uint8Array(buf);
  for (var i=0; i!=s.length; ++i) view[i] = s.charCodeAt(i) & 0xFF;
  return buf;
}