[Rt-devel] Spreadsheet download - fixed columns

[Stephen Turner]

I noticed that on the search results page, the "spreadsheet" link yields a 
fixed, hard-coded set of columns - not necessarily the columns that are 
displayed on the page. This seems (to me) counter-intuitive - I would 
expect to get a spreadsheet copy of what's on the screen. The fact that the 
whole of the query (& format) string is passes to Results.tsv seems to 
indicate that the spreadsheet columns should match the screen columns.

Anyway, my question is - what is the intent of the link? And if it does 
behave as intended, would there be interest in a second download link that 
gives a spreadsheet copy of the displayed search results? I have a .tsv 
that does this that I could contribute.

[One thing I found in digging around this subject, is that Results.html & 
Results.tsv use different mechanisms for retrieving data - and that the 
Results.html data retrieval piece has html code embedded. It would be good 
if all of the search-processing pieces could use a common data-retrieval 
component that would be independent of presentation method. The 
Results.html data retrieval seems to be the most flexible, and is what I 
used to do my own .tsv page - but this would involve removing html 
knowledge from the data retrieval]

Steve



Stephen Turner
Senior Programmer/Analyst - Client Support Services
Information Services and Technology (IS&T)

sturner at mit.edu