populate excel workbook from a view

What is the best way to populate an excel workbook from a view?

I want to design a textbox "StudentId" and a button "Show Grades" in a view.

Once a student enters "StudentId" and clicks "Show Grades" I want to pull "Grades" from "StudentTable" for that particular "StudentId" and display it in an Excel wo开发者_StackOverflow中文版rkbook.

How could I do this?

Thanks in advance

If exporting to Excel 2007+ (.xlsx) is ok for your situation, you could take a look at the EPPlus library. It's worked very well for me. You don't need to have office installed.

http://epplus.codeplex.com/

http://epplus.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=WebapplicationExample

Exporting to excel can be tricky from a website. I have yet to find one clean way to do it. Mostly because it requires office to be installed on the server.

Here are some examples out there.

http://forums.asp.net/t/1038105.aspx/1

http://madskristensen.net/post/Export-a-DataTable-to-Excel-in-ASPNET.aspx

But I would suggest simply exporting in .csv

The expensive, but incredibly complete option: Office Writer

The other option is to populate a Gridview then change then tweak the response headers to get the browser to download the result an Excel workbook.

I use the following to produce a simple spreadsheet:

public class GridViewExportUtil
{
    /// <summary>Exports a Gridview to Excel</summary>
    /// <param name="fileName">File Name For The Excel file.</param>
    /// <param name="gv">Gridview to Export</param>
    public static void Export(string fileName, GridView gv)
    {
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Clear();
        HttpContext.Current.Response.AddHeader(
            "content-disposition", string.Format("attachment; filename={0}", fileName));
        HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType = "application/ms-excel";
        bool dataAdded = false;

        using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())
        {
            using (HtmlTextWriter htw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw))
            {
                //  Create a form to contain the grid
                Table table = new Table();

                //Add Lines
                table.GridLines = gv.GridLines;


                //  add the header row to the table
                if (gv.HeaderRow != null)
                {
                    GridViewExportUtil.PrepareControlForExport(gv.HeaderRow);
                    table.Rows.Add(gv.HeaderRow);

                    //Add Some Basic Formatting
                    foreach (TableCell tc in table.Rows[table.Rows.Count - 1].Cells)
                    {
                        tc.Style.Add(HtmlTextWriterStyle.FontWeight, "bold");
                        tc.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Black;
                        tc.ForeColor = System.Drawing.Color.White;
                    }
                }

                //  add each of the data rows to the table
                foreach (GridViewRow row in gv.Rows)
                {
                    GridViewExportUtil.PrepareControlForExport(row);
                    table.Rows.Add(row);
                    dataAdded = true;
                }

                //If no data added add row with the Gridviews' no data message
                if (!dataAdded)
                {
                    TableCell cell = new TableCell();
                    cell.Text = gv.EmptyDataText;
                    cell.Style.Add(HtmlTextWriterStyle.FontWeight, "bold");

                    TableRow tmpRow = new TableRow();
                    tmpRow.Cells.Add(cell);

                    table.Rows.Add(tmpRow);
                }

                //  add the footer row to the table
                if (gv.FooterRow != null)
                {
                    GridViewExportUtil.PrepareControlForExport(gv.FooterRow);
                    table.Rows.Add(gv.FooterRow);
                }                    

                //  render the table into the htmlwriter
                table.RenderControl(htw);

                //  render the htmlwriter into the response
                HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(sw.ToString());
                HttpContext.Current.Response.End();
            }
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Replace any of the contained controls with literals
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="control"></param>
    private static void PrepareControlForExport(Control control)
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < control.Controls.Count; i++)
        {
            Control current = control.Controls[i];
            if (current is LinkButton)
            {
                control.Controls.Remove(current);
                control.Controls.AddAt(i, new LiteralControl((current as LinkButton).Text));
            }
            else if (current is ImageButton)
            {
                control.Controls.Remove(current);
                control.Controls.AddAt(i, new LiteralControl((current as ImageButton).AlternateText));
            }
            else if (current is HyperLink)
            {
                control.Controls.Remove(current);
                control.Controls.AddAt(i, new LiteralControl((current as HyperLink).Text));
            }
            else if (current is DropDownList)
            {
                control.Controls.Remove(current);
                control.Controls.AddAt(i, new LiteralControl((current as DropDownList).SelectedItem.Text));
            }
            else if (current is CheckBox)
            {
                control.Controls.Remove(current);
                control.Controls.AddAt(i, new LiteralControl((current as CheckBox).Checked ? "True" : "False"));
            }

            if (current.HasControls())
            {
                GridViewExportUtil.PrepareControlForExport(current);
            }
        }
    }
}

This has no extra requirements server side at all.