Creating Excel document from Dataset and XML ?

[Paul]

Hi all

Arggghhh...........
The problem.....I want the user to be able to create an excel document and
name particular cells in the document where they want the data to be placed
and then save this out of an XML file or Excel Template file.

Next I need to convert a dataset to xml and try and transform this data into
the users xml file..........i've seen a few things on this but havent had
much success...

basically

1. template file in xml with named cells
2. xml data payload
3. xsl style sheet to blend them all together

please if someone has an example then please respond. I know there a few
applications out there that does this, but hey it cant be that hard, just
not p to scracth with my xsl stuff.

thanks

 

[Ken Tucker [MVP]]

Hi,

Maybe this will help.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307021

Ken

 

[Paul]

The example just goes through creating an excel sheet using a XSL sheet
which obviously at a user level they would have no idea of creating,
basicaly I want the user to populate an excel file with pointers to where
they wan the data and to embed the dataset into the excel sheet and save
this out.

Thanks
Paul

 

[Fergus Cooney]

Hi Paul,

!! ... hey it cant be that hard ...

Are you sure about that? What sort of Xml does Excel produce - nice clean
economical stuff or reams of God-know-what?

Another alternative that might be worth investigating is to use the
XmlDocument class and do it programmatically.

Regards,
Fergus

 

[Paul]

lol,

Well yeah the easy way is do it programmatically but I need the ability for
a user to create a template file, so that they can setup the font details,
page headers etc. We used ot do it by spawning excel but it just seems to
dangerous to do this on the web server.