I am currently exporting to Excel using the old HTML trick, where I set the MIME type to application/ms-excel. This gives the added benefit of nicely formatted tables, however the negative of the excel document not being native Excel format.
I could export it as CSV, but then this would not be formatted.
I have read brief snippets that you can export it as XML to create the Excel document, but cannot find too much information on this. Does anybody know of any tutorials and/or benefits of this? Can it be formatted tables using this method?
Thanks.
Easiest way, you could parse your table and export it in Excel XML format, see this for example: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_jones/archive/2005/06/27/433152.aspx
It allows you to format the table as you whish (borders, fonts,colors, I think even formulas), and Excel will recognize it as native excel format. As a plus, you can use other programs that can import Excel XML (ie.Open office, Excel viewer,etc) and you do not need to have Office components installed on the server.
Check out ExcelXmlWriter.
We've been using it for some time and it works well. There are some downsides to the xml format however. Since it's unlikely your end users will have the .xml extension associated with Excel, you end up having to download files as .xls with an Excel mime type. When a user opens a file downloaded in this way they get a warning that the file is not in xls format. If they click through it, the file opens normally.
The only alternative is a paid library to generate native Excel files. That's certainly the best solution but last time we looked there were no good, free libraries (may have changed)
Bill Sternberger has blogged a very simple solution here:
export to excel or csv from asp.net mvc
Just today I had to write a routine that exported data to excel in an MVC application. Here's the details so someone may benefit in the future, first the user had to select some date ranges and areas for the report. On the post back, this method was in place, with TheModelTypeList containing the data from LINQ/Entity Framework/SQL Query returning strong types:
if (ExportToExcel) {
var stream = new MemoryStream();
var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(List<SomeModelType>));
serializer.Serialize(stream, TheModelTypeList);
stream.Position = 0;
FSR = new FileStreamResult(stream, "application/vnd.ms-excel");
}
The only catch on this one was the file type was not known when opening so the system prompted for the application to open it... this is a result of the content being XML.... I'm still working on that.
I am using Spreadsheet Light, an Open-Source library that provides ridiculously easy creation, manipulation and saving of an Excel sheet from C#. You can have an MVC / WebAPI Controller do the work of creating the file and either
Return a URL link to the saved Excel file to the page and invoke Excel to open it with an ActiveX object
Return a Data Content Stream to the page
Return a URL link to the calling page to force an Open / Save As dialog
http://spreadsheetlight.com/
Related
I search many times in Google, SO, and I can't find anything about working with attachment via delphi, so I decide to write this question.
I have a table in .accdb database called Files with those fields:
IDFile PK AutoIncField,
FileName WideStringField,
FilesAttached WideMemoFiled.
How can I save/load files to/from attachment fields using delphi?
Attach files and graphics to the records in your database
The problem here, in delphi the datatype of FilesAttached is TWideMemoField,
when I write ShowMessage(FDTable1FilesAttached.Value); it give just the name of the attachment.
I don't know how to Insert/save files to/from that field using delphi.
It didn't seem that hard to find VBA/C# examples of working with .accdb Attachment fields which should translate fairly easily into Delphi. However, it turned out to be more difficult than I imagined to find something that a) hadn't misunderstood what Attachment fields actually are and b) actually works. Skip to the update section below.
For example, googling
accdb create attachment in vba
gives numerous hits including this one
http://sourcedaddy.com/ms-access/working-with-attachment-fields.html
which you might try as a starting point. It uses MS DAO objects, and includes straightforward code for storing files to Attachment fields and for accessing them. You would need to create a Delphi wrapper unit for the DAO type library, if you don't already have one, using the IDE's Import Type Library
If you would prefer something ADO-based, you might take a look at
https://www.codeproject.com/Questions/843001/Handling-fields-of-Attachment-type-in-MS-Access-us
Update See the function OpenFirstAttachmentAsTempFile in the post by "aspen" (date = 4/11/2012 07:18 am) in this thread
https://access-programmers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=224112&page=2
which shows an apparently successful attempt to extract a file from an attachment field (the thread also contains several other attempts at coding this function).
Note in particular this line
Set rstChild = rstCurrent.Fields(strFieldName).Value ' the .Value for a complex field returns the underlying recordset
which implies that the Value of the attachment field can return a recordset which contains the attached file(s).
Presumably, importing a recent version of the DAO type library into Delphi would allow
a Delphi app to do the same thing, and then one could reverse-engineer the rstChild recordset to see how to populate this field in code. I haven't done that yet, though.
In my iOS project, I have programmatically generated csv file from my data. Most of time, it looks all good for Microsoft Excel and Apple Numbers to open with.
But when the cell data is something like 5 - 60, it seems Excel would automatically convert it to date value like May-60, while Numbers open it correctly.
I have found this thread: https://stackoverflow.com/a/165052/833885, so the solution makes Excel happy is using "=""5 - 60""". But this will make Numbers shows ="5 - 60"......
You can quickly generate empty csv file to test what I described above.
Is is possible to generate csv file that makes all world happy???
Thanks in advance.
You can create a new file in excel and import from the data ribbon tab - this gives options to specify the data types for 'columns' in the csv. A bit of a pain but will avoid the issue.
there is an xls file which needs to be displayed as a bar graph and on click on the column it needs to display data from xls file pertaining to that column representation on an IPAD .I am new to this but how do I proceed from here.Since its in xls format what can I do with that is there an inbuilt function which converts it into csv ?.Its an offline project .Kindly help me .Thanks in Advance.
Check out https://github.com/dhoerl/DHlibxls It has a nice wrapper around libxls. There are no built-in functions to convert from xls to csv, but you can easily write your own using this library.
I should note that libxls is LGPL, so be careful.
I am working on asp.net mvc. I am trying to display the rich text formatted content like,
{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\uc1\htmautsp\deff2{\fonttbl{\f0\
fcharset0 Times New Roman;}{\f2\fcharset0 Tahoma;}}{\colortbl\red0\green0\blue0;\red255\green255\blue255;}\loch\hi
ch\dbch\pard\plain\ltrpar\itap0{\lang1033\fs24\f2\cf0 \cf
0\ql{\f2 {\ltrch AMANDA WITH RC CALLED AND WANTED TO
VERIFY THAT WE WERE AFFILIATED WITH SHAUN # JAGGYS. LET HER KNOW WE
WERE, SHAUN CALLED RC AS WELL TO VERIFY STATUS OF BD}\li0\ri0\sa0\sb0\fi0\ql\par}
}
}
in the view. Actually this data could come from database table and i need to display it in the editor type control. so is there any open source controls that are able to display rich text format.
Well, I just got done writing a RTF to HTML converter that maintains all embedded media, and creates a MIME multipart message out of it. This is close to what you want to do. Essentially if you aren't interested in writing your own converter, you can look at this CodeProject and use his: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/27431/Writing-Your-Own-RTF-Converter
There is also descriptions as to how to reach his solution.
On my project we just started ripping apart the RTF document and parsing its contents. Open source and 3rd-Party Libraries weren't an option for me.
I need to generate a PDF and an Excel file from my ASP.net MVC application.
Any ideas on the best way to implement this?
Use iTextSharp to create the PDF and return it with a FileContentResult.
I recommend writing a reporting services report (RDLC), deploying it with the web application, and using the report viewer control to render the output.
Bringing reporting services in may seem like a steep learning curve, but it is not too bad. You get the added benefit of a solid solution that supports other formats. You don't need a report server for this deployment scenario - not even SQL Server.
Create a PDFActionResult and an ExcelActionResult
EDIT
Example for an excelactionresult: http://stephenwalther.com/blog/archive/2008/06/16/asp-net-mvc-tip-2-create-a-custom-action-result-that-returns-microsoft-excel-documents.aspx
something like abcpdf is cool for creating the PDF, as for excel you just need to create a datatable from your dataset
var grid = new System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataGrid();
grid.HeaderStyle.Font.Bold = true;
grid.DataSource = yourdatahere;
grid.DataMember = yourdatahere.Stats.TableName;
grid.DataBind();
// render the DataGrid control to a file
using (var sw = new StreamWriter("c:\\test.xls"))
{
using (var hw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw))
{
grid.RenderControl(hw);
}
}
as for doing it with a pdf, that would depend on what route you take!
For PDF, you can use PdfSharp. For Excel, I think Aspose.Cells will be good (although I've never used it, I have used their Word component and it rocks).
PDF - use NFOP, PdfSharp or iSharpText
Excel - if you need plain data as a spreedshet, then render as plain-text CSV file. If you need formatting and all the whistles, then use GBSpreadsheet.