Re: Creating Office documents

[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 g...@mira.net 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 a 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

[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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