NPOI writing XLS file converting to Azure Blob - excel

Question

I'm trying to convert current application that uses NPOI for creating xls document on the server to Azure hosted application. I have little experience with NPOI and Azure so 2 strikes right there. I have the app uploading the xls to Blob container however it is always blank (9 bytes). From what I understand NPOI uses filestream to write to the file so I just changed that to write to the blob container.
Here is what i think are the relevant portions:
internal void GenerateExcel(DataSet ds, int QuoteID, string ReportFileName)
{
string ExcelFileName = string.Format("{0}_{1}.xls",ReportFileName,QuoteID);
try
{
//these 2 strings will get deleted but left here for now to run side by side at the moment
string ReportDirectoryPath = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(".") + "\\Reports";
if (!Directory.Exists(ReportDirectoryPath))
{
Directory.CreateDirectory(ReportDirectoryPath);
}
string ExcelReportFullPath = ReportDirectoryPath + "\\" + ExcelFileName;
if (File.Exists(ExcelReportFullPath))
{
File.Delete(ExcelReportFullPath);
}
// Create a new workbook.
var workbook = new HSSFWorkbook();
//Rest of the NPOI XLS rows cells etc. etc. all works fine when writing to disk////////////////
// Retrieve storage account from connection string.
CloudStorageAccount storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("StorageConnectionString"));
// Create the blob client.
CloudBlobClient blobClient = storageAccount.CreateCloudBlobClient();
// Retrieve a reference to a container.
CloudBlobContainer container = blobClient.GetContainerReference("pricingappreports");
// Create the container if it doesn't already exist.
if (container.CreateIfNotExists())
{
container.SetPermissions(new BlobContainerPermissions { PublicAccess = BlobContainerPublicAccessType.Blob });
}
// Retrieve reference to a blob with the same name.
CloudBlockBlob blockBlob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(ExcelFileName);
// Write the output to a file on the server
String file = ExcelReportFullPath;
using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(file, FileMode.Create))
{
workbook.Write(fs);
fs.Close();
}
// Write the output to a file on Azure Storage
String Blobfile = ExcelFileName;
using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(Blobfile, FileMode.Create))
{
workbook.Write(fs);
blockBlob.UploadFromStream(fs);
fs.Close();
}
}
I'm uploading to the Blob and the file exists, why doesn't the data get written to the xls?
Any help would be appreciated.
Update: I think I found the problem. Doesn't look like you can write to a file in Blob Storage. Found this Blog which pretty much answers my questions: it doesn't use NPOI but the concept is the same. http://debugmode.net/2011/08/28/creating-and-updating-excel-file-in-windows-azure-web-role-using-open-xml-sdk/
Thanks

Answer 1

Can you install fiddler and check the request and the response packets? You may also need to seek back to 0 between two writes . So the correct code here could be to add the below before trying to write the stream to blob.
workbook.Write(fs);
fs.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
blockBlob.UploadFromStream(fs);
fs.Close();
I also noticed that you are using String Blobfile = ExcelFileName instead of String Blobfile = ExcelReportFullPath.