Question

Currently our application exporting large data to office 2003 xml spreadsheet format in server.
The user can download the xml file.The file can be easily opened in office 03 and 07 correctly.
I want to know whether it is possible to create xls and xlsx format from this xml file in server and serve them to user?

[The server doesn’t have office and neither will be.So interop is useless in this case.]

====== EDIT=====

Can’t use third party solutions… 🙁

Answer 1

If I understand your question corretly, you are not just serving ‘pure’ XML, but SpreadsheetML that is interpreted by Excel just as an ordinary Excel-file in binary format. So your users already have a very nice solution. How do are you creating those files? I use an XSLT to transform my XML-data to SpreadsheetML that is just a specific XML-format. In that way I can do anything that is possible in Excel (formattings, formulas etc.). It yould be much more than just transforming XML to CSV.

Why do you want to change this? I can see that the resulting XML-Excel file usually is huge, is that the reason?

Now, since Excel 2007 format (xlsx) is basically a zip-archive of some XML-files describing the structure and the data of the file — just rename the file extension name of any xlsx to zip and inspect after extracting — you might be able to adapt your existing solution, i.e. instead of creating one SpreadsheetML-(XML)File create several and pack/zip them one the server. I assume your normal server installation should have the necessary tools.

BUT – this solution is difficult to maintain (as you might know wiht you current solution — if I am at all right) and changes in the XSLT to add new functionality requires quite a bit of knowledge. So again I as well can recommend Aspose.Cells, even some knowledgeable users might be able to change simple formats.

HTH
Andreas