Re: Creating Office documents

2012-05-22 Thread David Burela
I know that you can create Word & Excel documents with 3rd party
components, without having office installed on the client
e.g.
http://samples.infragistics.com/sllob/infragistics-word
http://samples.infragistics.com/sllob/infragistics-excel

If you want a free component to do it, there might be a way to do it with
the open office library and do it server side? But then you still need to
find a way to send it to the client, as Greg mentioned
-David Burela

On 19 May 2012 13:36, Greg Keogh  wrote:

> 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
>
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RE: Creating Office documents

2012-05-18 Thread Greg Keogh
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 

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Re: Creating Office documents

2012-05-18 Thread Les Hughes
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
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Creating Office documents

2012-05-18 Thread Greg Keogh
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

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