iConsole Search Definition Reference Guide › Advanced Features › Customizing Results for Display or Download

Customizing Results for Display or Download

By default, you can download the complete set of results from an iConsole search in XML Spreadsheet format, suitable for loading into Microsoft Excel. This behavior can be customized in three ways:

• The download format for all searches can be changed by using the registry value SearchResultsDownloadFormat to specify the file type (such as csv).

  Note: The file extension used by the iConsole when downloading search results can be set using the SearchResultsDownloadExt registry value. If using the xls format, the default file extension is xml for compatibility with Microsoft Excel 2007. For Excel 2003, we recommend setting this value to xls.

• Additional download tools can be specified in the search definition using the <tool> element to invoke the function DownloadResults, specifying the required format. For example:

  …
  <tool name="xyz_download" 
    tooltip="Download file in XYZ format"
    icon="download-xyz.gif"
    function="DownloadXYZ"/>
  <script>
    <![CDATA[
      <script language="javascript">
      <!--
        function DownloadXYZ()
        {
          DownloadResults('xyz');
        }
      -->
      </script>
    ]]>
  </script>
  …
  

• Specify a download format to be displayed inline. In this case the format to be used is specified in the format attribute of the results element, and has the '$doc:' prefix. For example:

  <results … format="$doc:myformat.pdf" >
  

Built-in support is provided for two formats;

• XLS: XML Spreadsheet format
• CSV: Comma-Separated Values format.

Note: Built-in download formats are case-sensitive.

Custom formats can be implemented using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). A stylesheet named 'format'.xsl must be written to perform the required transformation from the search results, and saved in the following folder on the Web Service (back-end) server:

WebService\transformations\report-formats

Writing such transformations is beyond the scope of this document.

Note: The built-in download formats are highly optimized in order to support large numbers of results without reaching system time-out limits. Formats making use of XSL transformations will perform more slowly and should only be used when the number of results is modest (c. 2000), depending on the complexity of the transformation.

Note: Inline document formats are processed as part of the search and are therefore not subject to time-out issues, except when downloading the final document.

More information:

Toolbar Button to Show Excel Spreadsheet