Generate Excel file with PhpSpreadsheet in Codeigniter from a view - codeigniter

Question

I am trying to generate an Excel file with CodeIgniter and the PhpSpreadsheet library from a view. The reports that I need to make are not a list but much more complex and I can generate them more quickly with a view and sending parameters. This is my code:
$data = $this->model->bringdata();
$view = $this->load->view("data_view", $ data);
$spreadsheet = new Spreadsheet();
$writer = new \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Writer\Html($spreadsheet);
$writer-> save($view);
And the following error is shown
Severity: Warning
Message: fopen (): Filename can not be empty
Filename: Writer / Html.php
Line Number: 160
In the PhpSpreadsheet documentation it shows that an html page must be explicitly sent:
$writer->save("05featuredemo.htm");
Is there any way to do what I need?
Thanks for the help

Answer 1

It's a simple solution, you need to pass true to the third argument of load->view in order for it to return a string rather than sending it to the browser.
$view = $this->load->view("data_view", $ data, true);
Added after comment
I made the mistake of not looking into how the Html writer works.
The HTML writer writes a spreadsheet as an html file. It does not create a spreadsheet. As I understand it (and I might be mistaken) you can use \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Reader\Html to read an html file into a spreadsheet.
In your case I think you will have to save the string returned from $this->load->view() to a temporary file. CodeIgniter's file_helper might be useful here.
You then read the temporary file to create a spreadsheet. After that you can use $writer to save the spreadsheet somewhere as any of the file types the PhpSpreadsheet supports.
$view = $this->load->view("data_view", $data, true);
$this->load->helper("file");
$fileName = "temp_file_name.html";
$path = "full/path/to/some_writable_folder/";
$path_file = $path . $fileName;
if (write_file($path_file, $view))
{
//create spreadsheet the temp html
$reader = new \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Reader\Html();
$spreadsheet = $reader->load($path_file);
//write out to html file
$writer = new \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Writer\Html($spreadsheet);
$writer->save($path."05featuredemo.htm");
//delete the temporary file
unlink($path_file);
}
else
{
//handle the failure to write the temp file
}
I haven't tested this and I'm not sure you really want to save to an html file, but I think the above is close to the answer.
Second addition
If you want to save .xlsx files you need an Xlsx writer. Use the following instead of what's shown above.
//write out to excel file
$writer = new \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Writer\Xlsx($spreadsheet);
$writer->save($ path. "doc.xlsx");
I confess that I have never used, or considered using the html reader so I'm not sure you'll get what you want. I honestly think that creating an html table so you can import it into excel is probably doing it the hard way.