I would like to have fields in my Excel sheets be bound (in both directions) to a data source, in this case an Access DB.
For example, I would like to have an Excel sheet 'select' a particular record, say a customer, and then load information on that customer into the worksheet. Then, any changes made to that worksheet would be pushed back to the data store, making Excel a nice front end to the data.
Can this be done? From what I can tell "Get External Data" options in Excel are one way routes. My development background is heavy in ASP.NET C# and SQL.
Excel is designed to deal with datasets and not so much single records. For what you are trying to do with a single record, you would be far better off building a form in access, but as I don't know your environment/organisations limitations I'll make a suggestion.
Since you've obviously got a bit of SQL and coding skill check out this post for an option that would work for you - Updating Access Database from Excel Worksheet Data
You can get or put as much data as you want and can join tables too. It's a good basic get and then push set up.
Related
How can we upload a CSV file through web(ASP.NET MVC C#) and mapped the column in CSV table to our tables in database
Example:
CSV File:
Username,Address,Roles,Date
How to add all the value in 'Username' column to User Table, Name Column ?
Value in 'Address' column to AddrDet Table, Address Column?
Value in 'Roles' column to RolesDet Table, Roles Column?
AND choose the CSV column to be added to database? (So not all column in CSV will be taken)
using ASP.NET MVC C#
Because all I know is when the CSV uploaded, it will create DataTable specially for CSV and all the column in CSV will be uploaded
Thank You
I'm using MVC and EF DB FIRST
This questions is being marked as duplicate of Upload CSV file to SQL server
I don't feel (& don't think) that the question is related to or has completely same topic, so I'm answering this. I have myself marked question as too broad, as there is too much to explain.
Also I will add some links to the question, however they are not here to fill the answer, only to give OP an idea what question/topics to look for himself.
Short explanation:
Usually when You want to import data (CSV file) into database, You already got structure & schema of data (and Database). There is existing TableA and TableB, where exist some columns inside. If You want to dynamically create new columns/update schema of DB based on CSV file, this is an uneasy work (normally is not happening).
C#/ASP/.NET application is working in a way where You give it an input (from users' clicks, data load, task scheduler passed some time checkpoint) and the APP do the work.
Typical job looks like: "We got data in this format, APP have to convert them to the inner representation (classes) and then insert them to the server". So You have to write an ASP page, where You allow user to paste/load the file. E.g.: File Upload ASP.NET MVC 3.0
Once You have loaded the file, You need to convert the CSV format (format of stored data) into Your internal representation. Which means create Your own class, with some properties and convert (Transform) CSV into the classes. E.g.: Importing CSV data into C# classes
Since You have this data inside classes (objects - instances of classes), You can work with them and carry out some internal work. This time we are looking for CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations against SQL database. First You need to connect to SQL server, choose database and then run the queries. E.g.: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/837599/Using-Csharp-to-connect-to-and-query-from-a-SQL-da
Plenty of developers are too lazy to write the queries themselves and they like more Object-Oriented access to this sort of problem. They are using ORM - Object-relation mapping, which allows users to have same class/object schema in Database and in the Application. One example for all is Entity-Framework (EF). E.g.: http://www.entityframeworktutorial.net/
As You can see this topic is not so easy and requires knowledge in several parts of programming.
I have a webservice that is hosting a large mass of pricing data, and returns the data relevant to some prescribed query parameters. The data comes back as a Datatable object (in C#) - the object type itself doesn't matter so much as the fact that the data goes directly into memory and is not on a spreadsheet in the host Excel object.
Now, I want to create a pivottable off of this data.
I've been looking high and low on the web, and I can't see anyone explaining how to do this. Is it impossible? It seems foolish to suggest VSTO as the only supported way of consuming webservice data going forward, but make pivottables off of that data impossible.
The only solutions I have are kludges, and I want to make sure there isn't a graceful solution before I do one of these ugly things:
Dump datatable to excel sheet and point pivottable to excel range.
This is far from ideal because I'm either doing rowwise deletion
over the entire dataset (slow as heck) or peaking at 2x memory
consumption
Dump datatable to filesystem and point pivottable to flatfile.
This is even worse but at least doesn't have the memory drawback.
Are these really the only ways to do this operation? There has to be something more graceful.
DataTable: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.datatable.aspx
PivotCache: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.interop.excel.pivottable.pivotcache(v=office.11).aspx
Excel has to be able to see and access the data to make a PivotTable from it. So you have to make sure that the data is someplace that the PivotTable loader can read. Further, Excel is COM-based and can neither see nor process .NET objects.
It's pretty much just that simple.
Your choices are:
Load the data into an Excel range
Save the data to a file
Store the data into a database (Access, SQL Server, etc.)
Store the data in a data warehouse (SSAS, offline Cube, etc.)
That's it. The only other remotely possible way would be to implement the COM interfaces necessary to present as an OLE DB or an ODBC data source, but that would be one heck of a lot of work.
I have a test bed application available to 3 users.
If all users run the app at the same time, then a stored procedure runs, and all three will have result sets, currently using ADO.NET Datatable of approx 30,000 records which the app then needs to move into an Excel template for each of them.
The template is an xlsm file which contains some VBA that needs to run after importing the data. This template is saved in the solution.
I'm going to attempt to move the data from theDataTable to a worksheet using Excel-Interop
Has anyone any experience of moving this amount of data from Datatable into Excel?
#slugster suggested "setting up a datasource from Excel and just run the query using a dirty read" ... is it possible to set up a datasource in Excel linked to a non-materialized datatable?
Will looping through a table that is 30000 rows by 10 columns via xl interop run into problems?
Has anyone any experience of moving this amount of data from Datatable
into Excel?
Not from a DataTable object, but that amount of data using Excel's built in ability to import data, yes.
#slugster suggested "setting up a datasource from Excel and just run
the query using a dirty read" ... is it possible to set up a
datasource in Excel linked to a non-materialized datatable?
I would suggest this as well. To go further, I'd suggest creating a stored procedure then calling that. You should see better performance using a stored procedure. The procedure could collect and prepare the data then return it to Excel. Also, you may be able to build in a caching mechanism inside the procedure. For example, if your data only changes daily, you only rebuild the data in the source table once per day, so only the first user to request the data takes an initial performance hit. Also, depending on what type of post processing you are doing in Excel in VBA, maybe that could be handled in the procedure as well. The procedure will also help reduce the possibility of locking issues if you add SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED to the top of the procedure, or use the (NOLOCK) hint on the tables you are willing to allow dirty reads from.
Here's a nice article regarding using stored procedures in Excel: http://codebyjoshua.blogspot.com/2012/01/get-data-from-sql-server-stored.html
Will looping through a table that is 30000 rows by 10 columns via xl
interop run into problems?
This depends on your definition of "problems." I could see possible performance implications, however if you handle as much as you can in the stored procedure, you should be fine. In the world of data, that's really teeny tiny.
When I load from the database I use one store procedure which loads the DataItem and any Data associated with it. This comes back in one DataSet with two tables, the first table has one row and describes the DataItem and each row in the other table describing the related Data.
This DataSet is then used to populate my objects.
My problem comes when I have to save the objects back to the database. I am currently saving the DataItem and then looping through all of my Data and performing a save on each one. Completely horrible way to go about doing it, I know. It's both slow and it's not transactional.
So what I'd ideally like to do is convert my objects back into my DataSet and then save it all back to the database in one efficient transactional operation. What code do I need on the C# side to make this transactional and to allow me to pass back a DataSet. I presume this will involve using a TableAdapter. But given that I have two tables how will this work? What do I use on the SQL side - Can I use store procedures? (I would like to avoid having SQL in my C# project) Would I need to write something that will handle cycling through a datatable to save each record?
What's the best way to go about doing all this? This will form the lynchpin of a project I'm working on so I want it to be as fast and efficient as it can be!
(.NET 4.0 and SQL 2005)
Did not use TableAdapter in the end as it was more effort than it was worth.
From the comments:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/4esb49b4.aspx
I find myself in possession of an Excel Spreadsheet containing about 3,000 rows of data that represent either additions or changes to data that I need to make to an SQL Table. As you can imagine that's a bit too much to handle manually. For a number of reasons beyond my control, I can't simply use an SSIS package or other simpler method to get these changes into the database. The only option I have is to create SQL scripts that will make the changes represented in the spreadsheet to MS SQL 2005.
I have absolutely no experience with Office automation or VSTO. I've tried looking online, but most of the tutorials I've seen seem a bit confusing to me.
So, my thought is that I'd use .NET and VSTO to iterate through the rows of data (or use LINQ, whatever makes sense) and determine if the item involved is an insert or an update item. There is color highlighting in the sheet to show the delta, so I suppose I could use that or I could look up some key data to establish if the entry exists. Once I establish what I'm dealing with, I could call methods that generate a SQL statement that will either insert or update the data. Inserts would be extremely easy, and I could use the delta highlights to determine which fields need to be updated for the update items.
I would be fine with either outputting the SQL to a file, or even adding the test of the SQL for a given row in the final cell of that row.
Any direction to some sample code, examples, how-tos or whatever would lead me in the right direction would be most appreciated. I'm not picky. If there's some tool I'm unaware of or a way to use an existing tool that I haven't thought of to accomplish the basic mission of generating SQL to accomplish the task, then I'm all for it.
If you need any other information feel free to ask.
Cheers,
Steve
I suggest before trying VSTO, keep things simple and get some experience how to solve such a problem with Excel VBA. IMHO that is the easiest way of learning the Excel object model, especially because you have the macro recorder at hand. You can re-use this knowledge later when you think you have to switch to C#, VSTO or Automation or (better !) Excel DNA.
For Excel VBA, there are lots of tutorials out there, here is one:
http://www.excel-vba.com/excel-vba-contents.htm
If you need to know how to execute arbitrary SQL commands like INSERT or UPDATE within a VBA program, look into this SO post:
Excel VBA to SQL Server without SSIS
Here is another SO post showing how to get data from an SQL server into an Excel spreadsheet:
Accessing SQL Database in Excel-VBA