Our product has the requirement of exporting its native format (essentially an XML file) to Excel for viewing/editing. However, what this entails is having a dependency on Excel (or Office) itself for our product build - something that we do not want.
What we have done is export the data from our native format to a csv file which can be opened in Excel. If user selects an option to open the generated report as well, we (try to) launch Excel application to open it (ofcourse it requires Excel to be already present on the client system).
The data for most part is flat list of records.
Is there a better format (or even a better way) to handle this requirement? This is a common requirement for many products - how do you handle this?
Excel versions, both 2007 and several previous, have native XML formats. 2007, obviously, is XML by default, and earlier versions have the ability to save as XML. This SO question deals with the issue. I'd guess a little inspection would give an idea of what's required. I don't know if a XSD/DTD exists for older versions, but a little creative Googling might yield something.
As other people pointed out, it is reasonably easy to generate Excel XML files. You can do this in multiple ways. For example:
By creating a template Excel XML document, and then using XML DOM to stuff your data into the template, or
Converting the template Excel XML into an XSLT, and then simply passing your proprietary XML as input to XSLT.
I'm using ExcelPackage to create spreadsheets in one of my side projects. Works pretty good, but (at least the version I'm using) its a bit limited when it comes to styling and calculations.
ExcelPackage lets you create OOXML docs (.xslx files) that are natively compat with 2k7, but you can download a plugin for previous versions of Office from MS.
We export our data either using Excel objects (COM based code) on client side or CSV file (usually on server side, but can be used on client side too). And we allow copy data from grids in simple html format, what can be pasted into Excel without problems.
For one customer we even had to export data [from sql stored procedure] into csv-like tab-separated format, but named file like xxxxx.xls - this way excel opened that file in more correct way than csv file. Ugly hack, but worked well.
CSV is most compatible format (no dependencies on external applications or libraries), but customers don't like it. Maybe we need to incorporate some XLS export code, this way all users will be happy :)
If .csv isn't formatted enough, you could create a template in Excel, and use a little bit of VBA code to import the CSV and format it appropriately. This way your app is only concerned with generating the .CSV, and will use the same .XLS for each export.
If you're careful, you should be able to get this to work with most versions of Excel seamlessly.
With Perl there are several modules that can be used to produce .xlsx files without requiring an Office installation. Among those :
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::Writer::XLSX is the most well-known, with support for many Excel features like colors, formatting, etc.
https://metacpan.org/pod/Excel::ValueWriter::XLSX (I'm actually the author) has less features but is optimized for fast writing of large amounts of data
If you are working in Java, Checkout the POI project from APACHE.
http://poi.apache.org/
Simple, nice, complete, powerful.
We started with Office on the server, but that's not very nice. We had to kill processes that hung, and had quite a bit of a performance dip. We thought about putting it on a different machine, but didn't bother after trying and using Aspose (commercial). We don't have a very large number of simultaneous users, but complex documents. Simple ones can be handled easier with csv.
I've used FlexCel Studio for a couple of projects now. It's very functional and fast. 100% managed code, no dependencies. Sounds like you'd use the "Reports" feature which allows you to define an empty report template in Excel, then pass datatable and volia, it's populated with your data.
TMS Software
We use a combination of OleDB and Interop. We found that Interop was much faster and used less memory, but it's a pain for compatibility issues, especially when using different language installs of Office.
OleDb has the advantage that you don't require Excel to be installed on the client machine. Both Interop and OleDb support multiple sheets (tables) per workbook which you cannot do with csv.
If you're using C# or VB.Net, and your data is in a a DataSet, DataTable or List<>, then you can use my free "Export to Excel" class.
It uses the free Microsoft OpenXML libraries (so you don't need to have Excel on your server), and lets you export your data into a "real" .xlsx file with just one line of code, eg:
DataSet ds = CreateSampleData();
CreateExcelFile.CreateExcelDocument(ds, "C:\\Sample.xlsx");
All source code is provided on the following page along with a demo project, completely free of charge (and popups !)
http://mikesknowledgebase.com/pages/CSharp/ExportToExcel.htm
Hope this helps !
Related
Is there any way of reading excel data in ASP.NET Core (built over .Net Core)? I am not able to refer OleDB in project.json of my .net core project. Is there any other way of doing this?
Do you really need OleDB to read Excel today? To my opinion, OleDB is a bit outdated. There are opensource libraries to work with Excel files which are much easier to use and provide a lot of flexibility.
ClosedXML (https://closedxml.codeplex.com/) is one such library. It's well documented and allows to both read and write Excel files with custom cell style formatting.
I have used OleDB for reading very large Excel files too, it works but there are certain issues with it, here are a few of them off the top of my head:
You will need to install MS ACE OLEDB provider which sometimes is hard to configure.
You will have to read Excel files in passes while with ClosedXML you can access rows/cells randomly by id/address.
OleDB uses a Windows registry configurable setting to check the number of rows (default is 8) to determine the data type for the whole column and sometimes there are issues with it because the data type is determined incorrectly. ClosedXML allows you to set a specific data type for any cell.
I'm not a ClosedXML developer, so this is not an ad. As I mentioned, I have used (and continue to use) both OleDB and ClosedXML in my projects. With OleDB I was able to read very large Excel files (400-800K+ of rows for example) either row by row or using SQL Server "SELECT * FROM OPENROWSET(...)". Also SQL Server can directly write to Excel files using same ACE provider and it worked for very large files too.
However, ClosedXML I have used for reading/writing relatively small files but they used a lot of custom formatting. So if you start a new project I would recommend going away from OleDB.
The only limitation of ClosedXML is that it support only zipped XML Excel files, i.e. Excel version 2007+. You can find many examples on the ClosedXML site mentioned above which would help you to get started.
Let me know if this was helpful. Thanks.
As indicated by andrews, it is recommended to use a third-party library, especially when working with formatting. An alternative to ClosedXML is EPPlus. For most of my project I have used ClosedXML, but I had to switch to EPPlus because it has support for charts.
For ASP.NET Core, you can use EPPlus.Core. I have performed a quick test within an ASP.NET Core 2.0 console app and it seems to work fine:
var newFile = new FileInfo("some file.xlsx");
using (ExcelPackage xlPackage = new ExcelPackage(newFile))
{
var ws = xlPackage.Workbook.Worksheets.Add("etc");
ws.Cells[1, 1].Value = "test";
// do work here
xlPackage.Save();
}
With newly released Webi there's no way to manipulate reports with VBA like it was in DESKI era.
I'd like to know if there's a way for me to click a button with parameters in Excel sheet and get a report from the server?
I've been thinking of using the RESTful Web-services but it seems that there is a performance problem.
I also considered using a JAVA app in the middle using the SDK but it's not really satisfying as I add one layer.
Do you know if there's an other way to download a Webi report from and to Excel?
For this type of requirement, you'd normally use the OpenDocument feature. There is one thing that it won't do however, at least not for Webi documents, and that is deliver the output in Excel format (HTML and PDF are the two possible formats for Webi). In all fairness, the export to Excel option is only about two or three clicks away, but I can understand that this wouldn't be an ideal solution.
Another option is the Java SDK, which I would not recommend, as the ReBEAN SDK (the part of the Java SDK you need to interface with Webi documents) is deprecated and replaced by the REST SDK.
The REST SDK would be the way to go if the OpenDocument feature is not sufficient. Keep in mind that this would involve quite a few steps, each time sending a command to the WACS server and then decoding the answer. The steps would be:
Authenticate and get a logon token
Refresh the document (if necessary pass prompt values)
Export the document to Excel
Close the document
The REST interface is only supported on the WACS server, which should run on your BI4 server (unless you have a customised landscape). If it's slow, I would suggest looking into the root cause of this performance issue, instead of discarding the SDK altogether.
If you're going to use the REST interface, I would recommend opting for JSON to communicate through REST instead of XML. It's easier to read and parse.
A last option, which I wouldn't recommend, is LiveOffice. This is a separate product which allows you to embed contents from Webi documents into Office documents (most notably Excel). LiveOffice has always had its share of problems and has not received much love from SAP regarding much needed updates.
One final thought: the report will never appear in the same sheet, at least not without an additional amount of coding. Whatever SDK you end up choosing, you will always end up with an Excel file. If you want to show the results in the Excel file you started from, you'll need to code the steps to open the generated file, grab the contents and then copy those to your worksheet.
Coming from many different languages, I got stuck in ERP development. The thing is that our ERP is using XSL transformations to generate Excel files in SpreadsheetML format, which is saved with .xls extension, so that Windows open it within Excel.
This results in many unnecessary clicks that our users are forced into; excel screaming about "repairing" the file, wanting to save it with .xml extension - so our users have to pick correct extension in order to send it to client / colleagues... That's just unnecessary load from user standpoint.
Now, due to historical reasons we are unable to ditch the XSLT (and hey! it's awesome anyway) but what we do want to is to make the entire process streamlined from the user standpoint.
Generating 2007+ formats
In the end - after researching google thoroughly, I ended up writing xslt transformations "engine" which allows us to generate valid 2007 formats. All we do now is to generate the contents of sheet.xml in OpenXML format. It also allows us to generate macro-enabled excel files.
But seriously, is there something I missed? Is there any other way how to generate the Excel OpenXML format with some already maintained solution?
The SpreadsheetML is one way how to do it, I don't like it because it introduces a huge demand on end-user and does not contain images/macros. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong?
SpreadsheetML confusion
When I say SpreadsheetML I mean the "XML Spreadsheet" . I've noticed that Microsoft is calling the OpenXML Excel format also as SpreadsheetML - which makes me confused.
Are there any good ways of parsing Excel files in monotouch? Seems like most methods to work with Excel is based on using the Excel Object Library. Doesn't seem like that's even an option in monotouch? I read that objective-c doesn't have any native support for Excel-files, so don't know if that would change anything?
You would need to either
write your own
find an obj-c library that does it and write MT bindings for it
find a open source .NET library and port it to MT
If all you want to do is display a file, you can use the existing iOS document APIs to do it.
The newest Office formats are XML based, so depending on how complex the files are, writing your own parser might be feasible to do.
I ended up just writing the middle step, a web service that fetches the Excel file, parses it and serves up the content as xml/json.
Does anyone know of resources that can help me export simple contents of a GridView to a native Excel 2007 format (i.e. the OpenOfficeXML format).
I've already seen solutions like Matt Berseth's, and in fact I have been using that for a while, but it comes with an annoying warning produced by Excel 2007 as documented here stemming from the fact that a native Excel file is not generated; rather it is HTML.
My initial research shows that, at the core, xlsx files are zip files, but I have no idea how to produce these or what goes in them.
Any suggestions (or tutorials) would be greatly appreciated.
CarlosAg has an ExcelXML writer which works really well. It isn't a native excel 2007 formatted file, but it will be readable in excel 2007.
You will need to write a little method to do the exporting manually, the API is very straight forward though. You will create a sheet object, then a row object, then a cell object. You can just loop through your data and output it. The examples on the site are pretty decent.
I prefer using Microsoft's own Open XML Format SDK. It is free, it is released by Microsoft and it creates real .xlsx files.
You can find the reference documentation here, as you can see, it is pretty straightforward to use.
SpreadsheetGear for .NET can read and write native xls and xlsx files and is easier to use (takes less of your time) than other solutions because it has an Excel like API so you don't have to learn anything about Open XML.
You can see some live ASP.NET (C# and VB) Excel Reporting examples here and download an evaluation version here.
Disclaimer: I own SpreadsheetGear LLC