Question

I’m working on a Chrome Extension that uses WebSQL to store historical data.
Being WebSQL, the DB is stored on the client.

I’d like to add an option to export/import such data so that the user can share/use this data with other users, or with other PCs.

These are my first steps on a client-only database, so I wonder how to do this.
I was thinking to convert the DB to a huge json string that the user can copy/paste but doesn’t look very user-friendly.

Is there any better solution?

Answer 1

I got a single table dump solution working on a HTML5 database client I wrote a few days ago.

Check out http://html5db.desalasworks.com/script.js and scroll down to SqlClient.exportTable, this has an example that needs to be expanded to cover the whole database.

The steps are:

Step 1: Create the schema:

SELECT sql FROM sqlite_master

Step 2: Get a list of tables:

SELECT tbl_name from sqlite_master WHERE type = 'table'

Step 3: Loop through each of them and create an INSERT script with the results

transaction.executeSql("SELECT * FROM " + _tbl_name + ";", [], 
    function(transaction, results) {
        if (results.rows) {
            for (var i = 0; i < results.rows.length; i++) {
                var row = results.rows.item(i);
                var _fields = [];
                var _values = [];
                for (col in row) {
                    _fields.push(col);
                    _values.push('"' + row[col] + '"');
                }
                _exportSql += ";\nINSERT INTO " + _tbl_name + "(" + _fields.join(",") + ") VALUES (" + _values.join(",") + ")";
            }
        }
    }
);

Hope this is useful.

UPDATE JAN 2016 – WHOLE DB EXPORT

I’ve got a JS websqldump library that you can download from github as well.

This one will export the whole database. Check out the code on:

https://github.com/sdesalas/websqldump

Usage as follows

websqldump.export({
  database: 'NorthwindLite',
  success: function(sql) {alert(sql);}
});