I have been working with Azure quite a bit lately. We are looking to move all our hosted servers “into the cloud” – wherever that may be… Anyway, I have been working on a simple asset management system and I just started to implement the Azure Search API. I wanted to seed the index with existing data about the assets but I couldn’t see any easy way to export a list of the files in the container. Google to the rescue!

My search found a great post by Dave Ward on extracting data from an HTML table using jQuery. It is a pretty simple little snippet but it works quite well:

var data = $('#__fx-grid3 tbody tr').map(function() {
  // $(this) is used more than once; cache it for performance.
  var $row = $(this);

  return {
    name: $row.find('td:nth-child(1)').text(),
    url: $row.find('td:nth-child(2) .fxs-copybutton-value').text(),
    creationTime: $row.find('td:nth-child(3)').text(),
    size: $row.find('td:nth-child(4)').text(),
  };
}).get();

Use the snippet in the container details page and it will pull the name, url, etc. from the table. Now you’ve got the table data stored nicely in a local variable named data – but how to easily get at it? A little more googling found another simple little trick:

copy(data);

This will copy the data variable value to the clipboard. Now it is a simple paste into whatever text editor you favor. The above may be Chrome-specific, but if you are a web dev then you are likely using Chrome anyway – or at least have it at your disposal…