A couple months ago, Dave found an article about putting a dataset into excel - nice! You don't even need to make a gridview on a webpage, you could create a dataset and send it straight into an excel file. I spent some time this weekend adding it to the toolbox, and making a version that would work with a datatable*. Then I read about a possible issue - what it is exporting into excel is XML formatted data. This could be a problem, not all statistical software our clients use will be able to import XML is my concern.
A little more research and I found an article by someone who explained how to send data into excel without a gridview, and it's not XML formatted. It essentially sends a tab-delimited, plain text translation of the datatable. I created another class based on this method. I ran into one very odd bug - a Microsoft bug, natch - that if the first column is called 'ID' in caps, it break. No comment.
Please note that in the case of the both the XML formatted data and the plain data exports, since the gridview is not used, the data in Excel is exactly what is in the dataset/datatable. Therefore, if you have a gridview that formats the phone number for display purposes, but you use one of these classes to export the same data that binds the gridview, the end user will see the un-formatted data.
In conclusion, I plan to implement the plain text to Excel version from now on. It is in the Toolbox under DCReports, called ExportData.cs. The version that creates XML data from your data, then exports, is called Workbook Engine. I added the original sample code, and a version that handles datatables.
Questions? Comments? I long to hear the feedback! ;)
