RE: Creating Office documents
Les, one of my colleagues must be one of the few living people on earth who has managed to decrypt the open office SDK and has written library code that creates documents directly. It's all written in C++ so unfortunately it can't be used on the SL client side. There is nowhere to save the generated file anyway except for isolated storage (buried deep in the file system somewhere). OR... can DL apps write to My Documents? I forget. Perhaps the idea of creating the documents on the server and placing them in a public web folder has merit. Then I must wonder if it's possible to have a hyperlink in an SL app that can open a URL just like an tag does, I'll bet that's forbidden as well but I'll run a search on it. Greg ___ ozsilverlight mailing list ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozsilverlight
Re: Creating Office documents
Greg Keogh wrote: > > Folks, we’ve had requests for our SL4 app to generate Word, Excel and > PowerPoint files. Security restrictions normally prevent this and > there are problems with dependencies on the client. At the moment as a > workaround we simply paste XML and text into the clipboard and the > user then pastes it into Excel. We noticed that no other competitive > SL apps generate Office documents, so I presume they have given up > trying to overcome the security sandboxing like we did. > > However, we’ve had fresh requests so I thought I’d mention the topic > in here in case there are new products and techniques that I’m not > aware of. I think if our App is installed as a trusted out-of-browser > app then it do what we want, but we think it’s unlikely that anyone > will do that, and we haven’t tried it anyway. > > Perhaps we could generate the documents on the server side, place them > in a public URL and give the SL user a hyperlink to them. Has anyone > tried this? > > Cheers, > > Greg > Heya Greg, While I am not sure of specific issues to do with Silverlight, in generating excel documents you could: - generate a CSV - there are plenty of free 3rd party .Net components for creating excel documents without reliance on other external things. This may overcome any dependency/security issues by writing a valid binary/xml file directly. - aspose have a decent excel component, but they are pricey. (Microway do a pretty good deal $$$) All the above 3 options would work with a server side solution too. While not recommended by microsoft, Excel Automation using a singleton pattern could be used, but there are a few issues that may arise (or may not) dependent on what you are trying to do. -- Les Hughes l...@datarev.com.au ___ ozsilverlight mailing list ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozsilverlight
Creating Office documents
Folks, we've had requests for our SL4 app to generate Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Security restrictions normally prevent this and there are problems with dependencies on the client. At the moment as a workaround we simply paste XML and text into the clipboard and the user then pastes it into Excel. We noticed that no other competitive SL apps generate Office documents, so I presume they have given up trying to overcome the security sandboxing like we did. However, we've had fresh requests so I thought I'd mention the topic in here in case there are new products and techniques that I'm not aware of. I think if our App is installed as a trusted out-of-browser app then it do what we want, but we think it's unlikely that anyone will do that, and we haven't tried it anyway. Perhaps we could generate the documents on the server side, place them in a public URL and give the SL user a hyperlink to them. Has anyone tried this? Cheers, Greg ___ ozsilverlight mailing list ozsilverlight@ozsilverlight.com http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozsilverlight
