SOAP Toolkit + Vista + Excel 2007 + Call Web Services = Impossible

mab — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:13:00 GMT

Well I wouldn't say impossible ... just not supported.

I had a conversation with a client that asked "Where do I get the latest SOAP toolkit for Vista?". I had to politely say "We don't support the SOAP Toolkit anymore." Which was followed by "Well how do I call a web service from VBA in excel?". The short answer is "you migrate to managed code!" and use Visual Studio 2005 Second Edition (VSTO) or the new Visual Studio 2008 Excel Workbook project.

Everyone that does Excel "programming" should be using managed extension excel workbooks and discontinue using macros or VBA for development like web service calls. Managed code gives you much more flexibility and support.

It is as easy as (almost) ...

Open Visual Studio 2008
Create a New Project
Select tye Office type/Excel 2007 Workbook
Add your bits and components to the workbook
In the (.cs or .vb) code behind, put in standard web service calls referencing System.Web and System.Web.Services, web references, etc
Enjoy a happy coding experience

Like to know your thoughts, but thought I would just write a little about my experience ...

Sending Excel 97/XP/2000/2003/2007 Output from ASP.NET 2.0

mab — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 18:59:00 GMT

I know there are several articles on the internet describing varous methods to send excel output from ASP.net. Additional, there are many great third party tools as well. I needed to do something simple and lightweight so I expanded on some examples. I needed to do some formating and embed and image. But first there is some setup to do.

Setup Web.config to enable XLS to be compiled and executed as ASP.NET code by the runtime

Under the <system.web> section:

Create Excel Output page

Add a web form name ExcelOut.aspx
Remove all html code, just leave the <@ Page ...> directive line
In code behind add the following code in the page load event (please note that html generated is incomplete and is only to show as a sample, please follow all html best practices in a production envrionment)

Response.Clear();
Response.Buffer = true;
Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
Response.Charset = "";
this.EnableViewState = false;
System.IO.StringWriter ExcelStringWriter = new System.IO.StringWriter();
System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter oHtmlTextWriter = new System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter(ExcelStringWriter);
ExcelStringWriter.Write("<table border=1><tr>");
ExcelStringWriter.Write("<td><b>blah</b></td>");
ExcelStringWriter.Write("<td width=\"100\"><img src=\"http://search.msdn.microsoft.com/search/masterpages/items/msdn.jpg\" /></td>");
ExcelStringWriter.Write("<td>1</td><td style=\"mso-number-format: _("$"* #,##0.00_);_("$"* \$#,##0.00\$;_("$"* "-"??_);_(@_)\">5000</td>");
ExcelStringWriter.Write("</tr></table>");
Response.Write(ExcelStringWriter.ToString());
Response.End();

Create a web form then rename to XLS extension

Create the page to call ExcelOut

Add a new web page called TestExcel.aspx
Add a hyperlink in the page like
<a href="Excelout.xls">Excel output</a>

Compile and run and you should something similar to ...

Even though the example below is an HTML table please note that the output is in excel and each item is in a excel cell. The "blah" is in cell A1 with font style of bold, "1" is in cell c1, "5000" is in cell d1 with a format on the cell as "$#,##0.00".

blah

$5,000.00

Summary

This is just an example how to export to Excel from ASP.NET using a simple html snippet that includes images and text formatting. Let me know what you think or any code improvements.

Mark Brown's Blog : Excel

SOAP Toolkit + Vista + Excel 2007 + Call Web Services = Impossible

Sending Excel 97/XP/2000/2003/2007 Output from ASP.NET 2.0