Silverlight Export to Excel

The latest thing I’ve been working on is exporting to Excel from my Silverlight Indicator.

With Silverlight 4 there are two problem domains, In Browser and Out of Browser.

The Out of Browser mode is dead easy using Automation Factory. For it to function it does require the Silverlight App to be locally installed with elevated permissions. There are several examples out there, on the web, of this type of implementation now I leveraged the approach posted by Pradeep at c-sharecorner.com for my application, see his code below. This is a great solution that opens the exported data in an excel spreadsheet.


Solution using Out of Browser Mode
Add reference to Microsoft.CSharp.dll to the project.


using System.Runtime.InteropServices.Automation;
…

///

///This code has been leveraged from the following site:
///http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/pchandraker/1899/
///
///

private void btnExport_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
dynamic excelApp;
excelApp = AutomationFactory.CreateObject("Excel.Application");
excelApp.Visible = true;
dynamic workbook = excelApp.workbooks;
workbook.Add();
dynamic sheet = excelApp.ActiveSheet;
dynamic cell = null;
int index = 1;
foreach (Employee emp in EmployeeGrid.ItemsSource)
{
cell = sheet.Cells[index, 1];
cell.Value = emp.EmployeeName;
cell = sheet.Cells[index, 2];
cell.Value = emp.EmployeeId;
cell = sheet.Cells[index, 3];
cell.Value = emp.Department;
index++;
}
}

Reference links –
Automation API - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff457794(v=VS.95).aspx
More documentation - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.interopservices.automation.automationfactory(VS.95).aspx
A slightly different implementation - http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/SL4InteropWithExcel.aspx
A similar implementation - http://deepumi.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/export-datagrid-to-excel-in-silverlight-4-0/

Solution using In Browser Mode

With the Out of Browser Domain covered, I needed to tackle the In Browser Domain. To my surprise there wasn’t as many solutions as I thought there would be out there. Exporting a datagrid to excel would seem like a common enough task. Though I did find one gem in the rough Raelango on codeproject.com had posted a nice solution that works great if the columns are TextColumns or are TextBlocks in a template column. It defiantly got me pointed in the right direction. You can see his solution here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/SilverlightDataGridExport.aspx

I took a similar approach though I ended up customizing the code to fit my customized data types. It led to a nice solution which saves to an XML or CSV file based on the user choice through a standard save dialog.