MS Excel reporting

[Former Member]

Hello.

.

Is there standard approach in MII for creating report in MS Excel?

I have 2 ideas, how it can be.

- Use OleDB to write data to Excel file. But I don't know operation in MII, that can copy Excel file from one folder to another.

- Use XSLT transformation. Byt i don't know is it possible?

It will be perfect to hear your experience in this question and your opinion about upper ideas.

[Former Member]

Hello David,

Could you tell more detail about your method?

I will try to do this.

Regards,

Mikhail.

[Former Member]

Hi Mikhail,

The way we did it was to have a servlet in an irpt page which returns the data which is to be reported in Excel.

An onload script is called in the body tag which creates an Excel activeX object, then pastes the data into Excel.

regards

Dave

[Former Member]

Hi Mikhail,

We provide functionality in some of our reports to view them in MS Excel. This is done by referencing an xsl stylesheet, for a servlet query template, which does the formatting. The body tag for the servlet irpt file calls an onload javascript which creates an Excel ActiveX object that the xsl output is pasted into.

This method had worked well for the last 2 years.

I personally do not like using MS Excel for reporting, but due to overwelming end user requests I conceded.

[Former Member]

Thanks Christian.

As example, I want to create report in Excel, that includes "template" (tables layout, header) and data in cells.

Regards,

Mikhail

[jcgood25]

Why not just build the report in HTML?

[Former Member]

Do you need to put the data into an existing excel "template" that performs some calculations or do you just want to dump some data into an empty spreadsheet?

Usually we just display the data to an igrid and allow the user to use the built in functionality and save the data as a cvs.

If there are some calculations or formatting being done in the excel, I would recommend moving that logic into MII and presenting the user with the end result they need