Question

We let users create ad-hoc queries in our website. We would like to have the user select their criteria, then click submit and have the results streamed automatically to Excel. I have the application populating a DataTable, then using the datatable to create a tab delimited string. The problem is getting that to excel.

What is the best way to stream data to Excel? Preferrably, we wouldn’t have to make users close an empty window after clicking the submit button.

Answer 1

Change the page’s file type to excel, and only stream the HTML necessary to build a table to the page. code from here

//for demo purpose, lets create a small datatable & populate it with dummy data System.Data.DataTable workTable = new System.Data.DataTable();  //The tablename specified here will be set as the worksheet name of the generated Excel file.  workTable.TableName = 'Customers'; workTable.Columns.Add('Id'); workTable.Columns.Add('Name'); System.Data.DataRow workRow;  for (int i = 0; i <= 9; i++) { workRow = workTable.NewRow(); workRow[0] = i; workRow[1] = 'CustName' + i.ToString(); workTable.Rows.Add(workRow); }  //...and lets put DataTable2ExcelString to work string strBody = DataTable2ExcelString(workTable);  Response.AppendHeader('Content-Type', 'application/vnd.ms-excel'); Response.AppendHeader('Content-disposition', 'attachment; filename=my.xls'); Response.Write(strBody);