Question

I’m looking at developing a Silverlight application that displays a lot of information in a DataGrid.

I want to somehow give the users the ability to copy this into Excel via the clipboard.

Is this even possible in Silverlight 3?

Answer 1

OK, I’ve figured out how to do it, but it’s not exactly elegant.

First of all, I lifted the CopyClipboard function from Jeff Wilcox’s Blog.

Now I’ve written code to generate an HTML table from the grid, and put that into the clipboard.

    private void Clipboard_Button_Clicked(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        sb.Append("<TABLE>");
        foreach (object obj in myDataGrid.ItemsSource)
        {
            sb.Append("<TR>");
            foreach (DataGridColumn c in myDataGrid.Columns)
            {
                sb.Append("<TD>");
                FrameworkElement el = c.GetCellContent(obj);
                TextBlock tb = el as TextBlock;
                if (tb != null)
                {
                    string s = tb.Text;
                    sb.Append(System.Windows.Browser.HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(tb.Text));
                }
                sb.Append("</TD>");
            }
            sb.Append("</TR>");
        }
        sb.Append("</TABLE>");
        Clipboard.SetText(sb.ToString()); 
    }

It’s especially bad because it’s calling

clipboardData.Invoke("setData", "text", text);

rather than

clipboardData.Invoke("setData", "text/html", text);

Because the second one throws a “System.InvalidOperation” exception. That means if you copy it into Word instead of Excel it isn’t a table, it’s a block of HTML.

But, yes, copying the datagrid contents to Excel via the clipboard is possible. Sort of.