I agree with you. I also need such a functionality. It's very useful for professional applications and should be, IMHO, a part of the Grid object. (Don't forget column titles).
TIA
JL

It's not possible to save a file directly from the browser to the user's computer. Saving the grid's content as a file requires sending a request to the server and receiving the file as a response with http response headers: content-disposition attachment. So, 'save to excel' is not possible with Dojo alone - you need a server component too. This server component can then format the data any way you want.

CSV file opens nicely in excel, but you can try also the following: return a simple html-page with file extension xls, containing the data in a html table. See: How to Export Data to Microsoft Excel

Hey Nilesh, JL:

What you want to do sounds like a good idea as an add-on of some sort.

So it's worth noting that there isn't one "right" format for incoming data to the grid. Instead, the grid uses a series of adapters and conventions to allow it to display data from many different kinds of data stores. For instance, here's a demo that pulls data from a CSV file and from a JSON structure for display:

http://download.dojotoolkit.org/release-1.1.0b3/dojo-release-1.1.0b3/doj...

What that's showing you is that what we see in the grid is a *view* onto these data files:

http://download.dojotoolkit.org/release-1.1.0b3/dojo-release-1.1.0b3/doj...
http://download.dojotoolkit.org/release-1.1.0b3/dojo-release-1.1.0b3/dij...

The grid itself *doesn't even know what data it could have*. It asks the backing stores for data in a lazy way, which is what allows the Dojo grid to handle such incredibly large volumes of data where other grids would just fall over.

The example I linked to above uses format-specific data providers and *they* are what do the adaptation between a potentially hierarchical (or even relation-free) data set and something that can be displayed in a grid.

That's the long way of saying that what you want to do is probably possible, but perhaps not in the way that you're thinking of it being done. Instead of focuing on the grid giving you a CSV export, perhaps we should focus on how to inspect a grid for it's column configuration and then query the grid's data store for a CSV conversion of whatever sort of query it may currently be displaying the results of in the grid.

There are also questions about what to do WRT complex cell formatting and computed/formatted values in cells which I'd love your thoughts on.

--
Project Lead, The Dojo Toolkit 
President, The Dojo Foundation

You may run into security issues if you try to save the file from Javascript without any user interaction - strictly speaking, a web page should never be allowed direct access to the client filesystem, whether read or write. That's why, for example, you cannot programmatically set the filename to be uploaded in an file upload box. There are various ways around this, I think, but in general it may not be a good idea to be seen trying to circumvent client security. (However, if this for a purely intranet application running on a trusted server, and your clients are using IE on Windows, you could look at trying to use Microsoft's FileSystemObject object - it has OpenTextFile and CreateTextFile methods which let you read/write/append text files.)

if (resultsGrid.model && resultsGrid.model.count > 0) {
	var xlApp = new ActiveXObject("Excel.Application");
	xlApp.SheetsInNewWorkbook = 1;
	var wb = xlApp.Workbooks.Add();
	var cellDefs = resultsView.cells[0];
        var k = cellDefs.length;
        // setting column names - omit if you do not need column headers in the export
	for (var j = 0; j < k; j++) {
	        wb.ActiveSheet.Cells(1, j+1).Value = cellDefs[j].name;
	}
	for (var i = 0; i < resultsGrid.model.count; i++) {
		for (var j = 0; j < k; j++) {
			wb.ActiveSheet.Cells(i+2, j+1).Value = resultsGrid.model.getDatum(i, cellDefs[j].field);
		}
	}
	xlApp.Visible = true;
} else {
	window.alert("Please execute a query before trying to export to Excel");
}