I'm looking to generate some C# code based on Excel data. Basically the Excel sheet contains definitions of functions that need to be generated in C#.
My current experience with code generation is mainly with ORM's. But now the "input" is Excel data.
I'm asking this to prevent me from re-inventing the wheel. Reading data from Excel is easy, and generating C# also. But I'm a lazy programmer.
Is there a code generation tool that accepts Excel files as input?
You can use T4 templates. I know this too common/abstract answer, but this is the way, I think, and I don't think you can find something already exist for that purpose. Visual Studio 2008 has native supports for them. In your T4 template you can read excel file and then use its data to create any code file you want.
I am guessing you will have to hand roll this solution. This does seem a little wonky, would be curious how you got in a situation where you are needing to do code gen based on Excel?!?
Having worked with this problem before, I suggest that you convert the excel file to a CSV.
Im my case, I transformed the CSV file into C# classes (which include property and method definitions).
Related
I have some data saved in .csv format. Basically I want to access this data within my Visual Studio project (using C#).
I've done some digging around and found things like this:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/415732/Reading-and-Writing-CSV-Files-in-Csharp
But it just seems a little too complicated. Is there a **built-in method to read the csv file format within Visual Studio? If not I will start using the method shown there.
Thanks!
EDIT: Sorry perhaps I should be a little clearer. The csv file is huge (35,000 rows), I guess I should be asking how best to handle this data. Should I write it as a table, or read from the file each time I want to access the data?
If it sounds like I'm confusing terminology I'm sorry. I'm not all that familiar with C# and visual studio.
The library I've had good sucess with can be found as a download at CodeProject
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/9258/A-Fast-CSV-Reader
It provides a great deal of flexibility and has the ability to allow you to deal with malformed CSVs
I need to make the information in the database usable by allowing the user to download it as a PDF or Excel spreadsheet (either one works, both is perfect).
I've looked around at a bunch of options, but I really can't decide which one I should use, let alone if any of those options are actually useful. Most of the options I've found revolve around converting already existing HTML files into PDFs which is not what I need. Also, it needs to be free. My bosses haven't given me a budget to spend on this
I'm not sure what other information I should include here.
Well, any help is greatly appreciated. If you have questions about missing information, I'll get it posted ASAP. I'm here all day, so I'll be able to respond to any comments very quickly.
EDIT: Oh wow! Huge thanks, guys, for the massive response! I got a ton of ideas. This is super-helpful. Thanks!
if you want to generate an Excel (or also a Word) you can use openXml. You can create a new document exactly the way you want from pure code.
OpenXml SDK page
The solution I usually propose to my clients in this situation is to use Sql Server Reporting Services (SSRS). You can use the ReportViewer control included with it in order to generate PDF's, Excel spreadsheets, XML files, CSV files, and others. If you need ad hoc reporting, there is a Report Builder available as well.
Barring that, you can use OpenXml to generate Excel spreadsheets and there are a host of PDF toolkits available.
Have you looked into the reportviewer control, which is part of Visual Studio?
It allows you to export the report in PDF or Excel format.
http://www.carlosag.net/tools/excelxmlwriter/sample
check this might be useful for you
There are lots of reporting solutions out there such as SQL Server Reporting Services(for which you might already have a license). Take a look at Reporting (free || open source) Alternatives to Crystal Reports in Winforms which can likely be applied to the web with a bit of serialization.
I would suggest thinking about rolling your own depending on the situation. You could use pdfsharp for the pdf export and EPPlus for excel. They are both very easy to use and, I'm pretty sure, available in nuget with a couple of clicks.
If you want to go the Excel route, i'd recommend this article from Stephen Walther entitled ASP.NET MVC Tip #2 - Create a custom Action Result that returns Microsoft Excel Documents. This uses an old trick of writing an HTML document with an Excel mime type. This is different than streaming a native Excel file. And it's fairly easy to change the to rendering a CSV file if you want to strip it down, and make it a more universal file. Just remember to double-quote all the fields if there's a possibility of commas showing up.
If what your doing isn't too complicated you can use CSV files. CSV stands for comma separated values, and it is what it sounds like. You can create simple tables and columns using commas. For example paste the following lines into a text file:
heading1,heading2,heading3
info1,info2,info3
info1,info2,info3
Save the text file as a .csv file and voila - an excel spreadsheet. Obviously it is extremely easy to build these looping object collections. Mind you if you need any complicated text formatting etc then it is not really the best option.
I'm working on a C# application that is going to save a DataSet to an Excel file.
I have found several examples of how to do this, but they all require you to have an xslt style sheet. I already have an existing Excel spreadsheet with all the worksheets and columns created. Is there an easy way to create an .xslt file from my existing Excel spreadsheet?
An example.
First of all, your question is really confusing and hard to understand. You might want to rewrite it to be a bit more specific. If you really have two or three questions, then ask each one on a separate page.
Step 1. You said that you have an Excel file. Open it up in a text editor and look at it. If it is in XML format, then the XSL that you need should be obvious because your job is to convert the existing XML dataset into the Excel XML format.
Step 2. XSL Templates are not magic. They are actually a form of programming language that is executed by an XLST engine. Of course it is possible to write a program that can compare two XML formats and generate an XSL template that would transform one into another, but that would be a very complex program and it would probably have some rigid requirements on the type of XML files that it would work with. I doubt that anyone has created such a tool that you can leverage.
Step 3. Get a decent tool that allows you to apply an XSL template to your dataset so that you can test it without a lot of work. Personally I use Netbeans with an XML Debug plugin, but there are numerous other tools out there. In fact, you could just write a simple transform tool yourself that just runs the XSLT on a sample dataset and then opens it up in both Excel and a text editor.
I need to create a script that extracts some data from a complex Excel 2003 file (with multiple sheets and different tables inside a single sheet) and produces different XML files that need to be validated against a given XSD file.
My preferred language is Python;
to create and validate XML files i would go with lxml.
What do you suggest for parsing XLS files?
Is xlrd the right tool to use for complex Excel files?
Or do i need to convert all the sheets in CSV manually, and read files line by line, splitting and getting data?
I accept C#, VB6, VBA suggestions too.
[disclaimer: I'm the author of xlrd]
xlrd is quite suited for this kind of job. Get the latest version from PyPI. Get the flavour from the tutorial found here. XLSX support is in alpha test; e-mail me if you need it. The awkwardness and lossiness of the save-as-CSV approach was one of the things that prompted me to write xlrd.
Xlrd is OK. We use it extensively to import XLS files full of references and formulas with multiple sheets and data presented in custom (not Latin-1) encoding.
I am convinced the most simple solution for this task is using Excel VBA together with MSXML parser. Look here for some links how to use the MSXML parser in VBA for reading XML files; you can adopt this easily for writing XML files, I think.
I cant answer whether xlrd/python is the right tool for the job - as I don't know python well enough.
But there are many ways to access the excel data...in the main you have VBA built directly in to Excel.
Then you have Ado.net See David Hayden's article here which allows you to access the data via any DotNet language...even IronPython
With Excel 2003 and higher it is possible to use the SpreadsheetML format to generate Excel spreadsheets with just an XML stylesheet and XML data file. I've used this in some project and works quite nice, even though it's not easy to do.
From the Microsoft Download site I've downloaded the XSD's that make up SpreadsheetML and in my ignorance, I've tried to convert them to C# classes. Unfortunately, xsd.exe isn't very happy about these schema files so I tend to be stuck.
I don't need an alternative solution to SpreadsheetML since it works fine for my needs. It's just that my code would be a bit easier to maintain for my team members if it's not written in a complex stylesheet. (It sucks to be the only XSLT expert in your company.)
All I want to know if someone has successfully created Excel SpreadsheetML files with .NET without the use of third-party code and without XSLT. And if you do, how did you solve this?
(Or maybe I just have to discover how to add namespaces to XML elements within XML.Linq...)
A while ago I used the XmlDocument and friends to create a SpreadsheetML document with formulae, formats and so on, so it is possible if a bit fiddly.
This MSDN page is what you need to get started with using the namespace in LINQ.
I have used this library and there is even a tool to generate the C# code that you need from an exsisting excel file.
http://www.carlosag.net/Tools/ExcelXmlWriter/
I had started on a similar problem a few weeks back, but due to some impending issues I had to put it at the back burner.
Back then I referred to this http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ExportClassLibrary.aspx?fid=113399&df=90&mpp=25&sort=Position&tid=2609600
I really couldn't get started with it but plan to get back on it soon. I hope the link helps.
cheers