Download Formatted Excel Reports Using the Reports REST API

To execute a report and obtain the results, the Salesforce Lightning Report Builder issues a REST request to the Analytics API. The API is a POST to the endpoint /services/data/vXX.x/analytics/reports/<reportId>.

After the report is created, use a GET request to obtain the results. By default, results are returned in JSON format, which the Report Run page renders. This format is specified in the Accept header information.

Request Excel Output

To request Excel instead of JSON format, change the Accept value in the request header to application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet.

Now when you execute a GET request, the Excel file is created. The raw response includes the Excel filename, as shown in bold in the following example. You can add code to your application to download the file from the response stream.

Raw Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2018 17:23:58 GMT
Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Content-Security-Policy: upgrade-insecure-requests 
Cache-Control: no-cache,must-revalidate,max-age=0,no-store,private
Set-Cookie: BrowserId=YJXhUq42SRyZ3hhgDPFxog;Path=/;Domain=.salesforce.com;Expires=Sun, 05-Aug-2018 17:23:58 GMT;Max-Age=5184000
Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Sforce-Limit-Info: api-usage=4/15000
Content-Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="New Opportunities Report-2018-05-06-10-23-59.xlsx"
Transfer-Encoding: chunked