table2csv | Extract data from an HTML table | CSV Processing library

The problem here is you're using AJAX when you should be submitting a form instead. AJAX is primarily about communicating with the server in the background, but you're trying to use it as a tool for submitting POST form data programmatically. Using AJAX will send a request to the server just like clicking a link or submitting a form would, but the browser does not navigate to the result. This is why you concluded that flask skips the render_template call, but the template does indeed get rendered. It's just that with an AJAX call, the reply only ends up in the AJAX success callback, not in the browser's main window.

In the case of an AJAX request like this, there's no need to send back HTML. You could for instance simply return "update successful".

You can fix your existing code by redirecting to the result page manually from the client:

It seems you are you some jQuery plugin to convert table data to csv. It doesn't actually create file on you disk. When you are making the ajax POST request to server you are sending the form data. On the server side you have clicked = request.form['data'] here clicked is not the file. But your pandas read_csv expects the url or buffer type. You can get around this issue with StringIO.

When working with npm you have arrived in a module world (as opposed to the static script world you're probably used to). Hence the folder where the installed packages reside is named node-modules.

Modules generally don't affect the global namespace, which means they do not make anything available to call globally in e.g. an inline event listener like onclick="".

You cannot directly reference any node_modules packages from your HTML, that would be a huge security problem as generally node_modules is not inside your webroot, and allowing access to files and folders outside your webroot would be extremely unsecure.

You have three options now:

1. Take a deep dive into the world of modules and module bundlers like webpack. This will probably take 3 months to understand and use while knowing and understanding what you're doing. If you plan to do heavy Javascript development, there's no way around this.

2. Copy /var/www/node_modules/table2csv/dist/table2csv.min.js to you project folder and include it just like your own Javascripts. This has the downside that you will have to do this manually each time you update the package.

3. Find a CDN (Content Delivery Network) that hosts the file you need, and reference it from there.

So a couple things to consider here. First, using a generator to create web content is going to be next to impossible outside of a websocket or async calls. The reason is that WSGI needs all the data to come before it renders. Then it closes the connection. You can yield data, but in a table, this is going to cause problems in raw html.

What to do:

I would use something like datatables (datatables.net) feed your table data into a variable, and let datatables handle the pagination for you.

Example using Bootstrap 4 and DataTables.

I believe the data for that table actually comes from a JSON service.