export

I've been getting into OpenSCAD lately—I'd rather wrestle with a text-based 3D modeling application for more dimensional models than fight with lockups of Fusion 360!

One thing I wanted to do recently was model a sheet-metal object that would be cut from a flat piece of sheet metal, then folded into its final form using a brake. Before 3D printing the final design, or cutting metal, I wanted to 'dry fit' my design to make sure my measurements were correct.

The idea was to print a to-scale line drawing of the part on my laser printer, cut it out, fold it, and check to make sure everything lined up correctly.

Some online utilities took an STL file and turned it into a PNG, but they weren't great and most wouldn't output a PNG with the exact dimensions as the model (they printed too big or too small).

Here was my model:

I typically use a MySQL GUI like Sequel Pro when I do database dumps and imports working from my Mac. GUI apps often give checkboxes that allow you to choose whether to include the structure/content/drop table command for each table in an export.

When using mysqldump on the command line, though, it's not as simple. You can either do a full dump and exclude a few tables entirely (using --ignore-table, or dump the structures of just one set of tables using the -d option. But you can't do both in one go with mysqldump.

However, you can use the power of redirection to do both commands at once to result in one dump file with all your tables, with structure only for the tables you specify:

Flocknote is a large web application that lets churches easily manage communications with their members via email, text message, and phone calls. Many of the core features of email marketing services like MailChimp and Constant Contact are implemented in flocknote similarly, such as list management and mass emailing (and many features like shared list/member information management, text messaging, etc. are unique to flocknote).

Until recently, few groups using flocknote didn't have subscription lists that were big enough to hit our relatively high PHP max_time_limit setting when importing and exporting subscriber data. Since we're getting bigger, though, I've started implementing Batch API all over the place so user-facing bulk operations could not only complete without resulting in a half-finished operation, but could also show the end user exactly how much has been done, and how much is left:

I've seen many tutorials, blog posts, and examples for using Drupal's Batch API for importing tons of data, but very few (actually, none) for exporting tons of data—and specifically, in my case, building a CSV file with tons of data for download. The closest thing I've seen is a feature request in the Webform issue queue: Use BatchAPI to Export very large data sets to CSV/Excel.

Before I get started, I want to mention that, for many people, something like Views Data Export (for getting a ton of data out of a View) or Node Export (specifically for exporting nodes) might be exactly what you need, and save you a few hours' time working with Batch API. However, since my particular circumstance ruled out Views, and since I was exporting a bit more customized data than just nodes or users, I needed to write my own batch export functionality.