I am using Microsoft.ReportViewer to display SSRS reports from my C# desktop application. The ReportViewr by default provides the 3 modes of export features, 1. Excel. 2. Word, 3. PDF. Now we want another export capability of RTF. Does any one have any idea how to convert the SSRS reports to RTF format?
SQL Server Reporting Services does not support RTF as a rendering format out of the box. If you want this functionality you have two options:
1) Develop a custom rendering extension
or
2) Buy a third-party solution, for example this one
If you can export it to a word file, you can use the word interop to read the file, select all, copy and paste to a richtextbox. You can get the rtf format from the RTF property of the richtextbox.
Related
My customer gave me some Word and Powerpoint documents which specify how certain 'reports' generated by our product are supposed to look like.
That means, I need to modify those documents (replace placeholders etc.) and then I need to export them as PDF.
How would you solve this problem in C# ?
TL;DR: Editing the office document is no problem at all, but exporting that document to PDF (using Interop) allegedly causes issues when running it as a web server application. That's the whole problem here.
I agree that Interop is not suitable for document manipulation in server environment. I would approach this problem by preparing MS Word template documents with placeholders for data. Then I would use c# to load the data for the reports and merge the data with templates to get final documents (docx, pdf, xps or various image formats). There are 3rd party toolkits which make it quite easy. Here is the code used by one such toolkit needed for merging xml data with the template to get a pdf document:
XElement customers = XElement.Load("Customers.xml");
DocumentGenerator dg = new DocumentGenerator(customers);
DocumentGenerationResult result = dg.GenerateDocument("MyTemplate.docx", "MyReport.pdf");
You can of course also use free libraries and SDKs based on OpenXML but you should expect a steep learning curve, lots of debugging and lots of time invested.
Wkthmltopdf might be an option.
A completely different "report approach" could be, to save those office documents with the placeholders as mht (That's MHTML a web archive format). This could be done directly in MS Office or even programatically.
The placeholders could be easily exchanged by string search and replace. The mht files could directly be used to show the report instead of the PDF. A clear disadvantage of the mht format, is the HTML formatting. With PDF you have a clear and fix positioning.
We are using this kind of report creation. There are some flaws, but it works and the customer could edit the mht templates directly by right-click Open-With the prefered MS Office flavor.
You can use report generators, like FastReport.Net for solving your problems. It can assign different data for placeholders and also allow export to PDF.
Its a general scenario when we provide an option of attaching a file (MS .doc) to end user. This file is stored in DB as binary. When user try to access this attachment next time, we allow them to download it. Now, here I want to give a feature to user where he should be able to open this doc file on click, edit it and save it without downloading.
.doc is a binary format and not easy to work with - a library such as Aspose, as mentioned by Christian, is definitely the way to go.
However, if .DOCX is acceptable (and that's Office 2007 and higher), then you can achieve what you want in three steps:
Convert .docx to HTML
Convert Word to HTML then render HTML on webpage
Display the HTML using any rich text control of your choice
What is the best rich textarea editor for jQuery?
Finally, convert HTML back to .docx:
Convert Html to Docx in c#
You would have to "reinvent" Microsoft Office Online (look into your skydrive account). I am unsure if there are any "out of the box" libraries for that, but you could build a simple editing app by leveraging Aspose word (or some other library). But that would be far from simple.
Link to aspose: http://www.aspose.com/.net/word-component.aspx
Word will only open files that are locally stored. What you are looking for is something similar to editing items that SharePoint provides using the WebDAV interface.
You may be able to use this approach to support your requirement. You should be cautious about the security aspects of the solution unless you have fully authenticated access to the shared folder on the server.
I am not sure if a standalone MS Word Document editor exists. However, this can be done with using a combination of rich text formatting / converting tool (for example, the DevExpress ASPxHtmlEditor + Document Server):
Load binary data from a DB;
Import loaded data (MS Word content) as HTML content into the ASPxHtmlEditor;
Edit imported data via the WYSIWYG ASPxHtmlEditor;
Convert the edited HTML back to MS Word content;
Save the converted / edited MS Word content back to the DB.
I believe, it is possible to do something like this if you have such products (free or commercial analogs) in your project.
I am generating my Report using DevExpress third party tool. my requirement is i have to print report in editable word document that end user can edit text and print.
DevExpress has a sample on how to export to doc/docx: http://devexpress.com/Support/Center/Example/Details/E4530
Needs DevExpress version 2012.2.6 to work though. If you don't have that version I think you need to check for other solutions.
You can use XtraReport.ExportToRtf(). See here for the documentation
Microsoft Word will open and save an .rtf document without any problems. If you really need the output in .doc or .docx format, have a look at this answer.
I am using SQL Server Reporting Service 2005(SSRS 2005) to export report to Excel and PDF and VS2008. But now i want an option to Export to Word also, but it is not possible in SSRS 2005 report that i came to know after googling. Here problem is that I CAN'T USE SSRS 2008 REPORT. So i thought that i will follow the steps as....
-- Export to Word
1. Export to PDF
2. Convert that PDF to Word document
Even after so much of googling i didn't got the proper answer. I told once and even telling that i can't use any third party tools so don't give me wrong path.
There are many fundamental differences between PDF and Word making the approach you want highly undesirable as a general workflow. I'll give just one example: PDF typically does not store information about document structure - sentences, paragraphs, columns, tables... All it stores is the actual text at certain locations at a page. Word of course does have those concepts.
Is it possible to do what you want? Yes, to some extent. In the general case with guesswork and approximation. If you know which information you want to convert it might be possible to search for it in the PDF file generated by SSRS and then generate a Word file out of it. However, if SSRS allows export to text, XML, RTF or any other structure based file format (however slightly structure based), you'd have a much easier time.
If you insist on doing what you suggest here, you would have to:
1) Write code to take the PDF exported from SSRS and interpret it (find the textual content you want)
2) Recreate the necessary structural information from that information (what are paragraphs, where and what are the tables, what's the formatting etc...)
3) Write that into a file Word can read (or create a new Word document directly using automation).
This would be a considerable amount of work, but you have all of the necessary information as the PDF specification is freely downloadable from the Adobe web site and it contains all of the information you need.
I'm working on a feature for a .NET 4 WPF/WCF/EF 4/SQL 2008 application that supports adding/editing Rtf or Excel content. We're using 3rd party components from Telerik and GrapeCity to support Rtf and Excel editing inside our product.
Among other pertinent fields, the "Entry" entity is simple and includes an RtfContent varchar(max), ExcelContent varbinary(max), and IsRtf (bit). IsRtf indicates if the Entry uses Rtf (true) or Excel (false). They are mutually exclusive.
Using the 3rd party controls, I can "export" the Rtf and Excel data as Pdf, Html, or each as Rtf and Xlsx.
We're wanting to include the Rtf or Excel content into a report, and we're using Data Dynamics Reporting package. I'm stumped on how or even if we can accommodate this request since Data Dynamics doesn't offer support for Rtf, Excel, Html, or Pdf. They do however, offer support for Tiff (and some other image formats).
I'm not sure if this would be a trivial conversion, but it may be the only way to include this content in a Data Dynamics Report.
Is it possible to convert any of those formats to a Tiff image? Or would it be possible to somehow "capture" the content of one of the 3rd party controls as a Tiff?
I can't say that I like the thought of performing conversions like this, but I'm running out of ideas.
Any thoughts?
This question addresses converting PDF to different images in C# and would probably work for you.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/711942/convert-pdf-file-to-jpg-asp-net