Browser saveAs

The latest feature request required the ability to export the data contained within an HTML table to a file on the disk. To do this, I looked at the W3C Writer API: https://www.w3.org/TR/file-writer-api/

This API is not yet implemented in all browsers, and I thought that I had to look elsewhere. But then I found this: https://github.com/eligrey/FileSaver.js/ an implementation of the W3C standard usable by modern browsers.

Including FileSaver.js into my document allows me to call saveAs as if my browser natively supported. Saving some text to disk is as simple as making a Blob with the text content, correct mime-type and then calling saveAs:

let blob = new Blob("text", 
{
 type:"text/plain;charset=utf-8"
});
saveAs(blob, "exported\_text.txt");

Using this in TypeScript requires the correct typings for saveAs. I didn’t find them for this project, I simply declared saveAs as any type:

declare var saveAs;

Super easy, and verified to work on my PC using latest Chrome and IE :-)