Question

I am able to save a single value into excel but I need help to save a full list/array into an excel sheet.

Code I have so far:

var MovieNames = session.Query<Movie>()
                          .ToArray();

List<string> MovieList = new List<string>();

foreach (var movie in MovieNames)
 {                   
  MovieList.Add(movie.MovieName);               
 }

//If I want to print a single value or a string, 
//I can use the following to print/save to excel
// How can I do this if I want to print that entire
//list thats generated in "MovieList" 

return File(new System.Text.UTF8Encoding().GetBytes(MovieList), "text/csv", "demo.csv");

Answer 1

If you mean you want to create a .csv file with all movie names in one column so you can open it in Excel then simply loop over it:

byte[] content;

using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
{
    using (var writer = new StreamWriter(ms))
    {
        foreach (var movieName in MovieList)
            writer.WriteLine(movieName);
    }

    content = ms.ToArray();
}

return File(content, "text/csv", "demo.csv");

Edit

You can add more columns and get fancier with your output but then you run into the problem that you have check for special characters which need escaping (like , and "). If you want to do more than just a simple output then I suggest you follow @Darins suggestion and use the FileHelpers utilities. If you can’t or don’t want to use them then this article has an implementation of a csv writer.