Spreadsheet generation - server side

Question

Hey

I got the requirement to output some reports as Excel 2002 spreadsheets.

Normally a job for reporting services - however - that's (edit) "not great IMO" and I hate it so for this project I used ExtJs - which doesn't do any excel output - not really - but does do the UI really, really well.

The reports will need to have outlining, grouping summaries and all sorts of formatting not available if I use the plain XML formatting. This is the one thing Reporting services does do really well. Gutted.

So... Does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives to reporting services and definitely not installing Office on the server? Crystal reports are just as (edit) "not great IMO" as RS so not that either :)

I have looked at aspose et al but their a bit expensive and i'd like to find something os if possible - such as perhaps using open office - if i can find a way of using oo on the server without actually installing it.

Has anyone ever done anything like this?

cheers

w://

sorry for the cross posting to alt.net - need as much input as i can get here :)

Answer 1

If your reports are not very large perhaps you can get away using the free version of Gembox Spreadsheed?

Answer 2

SpreadsheetGear for .NET can do it and requires only ASP.NET 2.0 on the server (no reliance on Excel or any other libraries).

You can see live ASP.NET (VB and C#) Excel Reporting samples here.

If performance is important at all, I would suggest running your own performance tests with your actual data and formatting as you compare your options.

Disclaimer: I own SpreadsheetGear LLC

Answer 3

The Perl module Spreadsheet::WriteExcel works very well at generating reports in Excel format.

Answer 4

I ended up going the OpenXml SDK route - which is a bit of a PITA in some situs but good in others - once you get the hang of it...

Answer 5

The answer to this depends on budget, time and whether r not you're allowed to install coms on the server -

for us all of the above were negative,

we needed the follwing:

export of generic data grouping of certain columns sumarisation of certain columns template based output

sql server reporting services offered all of this if - and only if you adhered to their rules.

what we have now is near as damn it ad-hoc reporting - using extjs for the ui, nhib for the domain castle windsor for the binding, and ooxml sdk 2.0 for the export.

if you need the code for the ulti level grouping excel output give me a shout :)

w://

Answer 6

I am working on (right now) a windows service that does Excel and PDF generation and merging on the server, unattended, using the SyncFusion XlsIO components.

So far this has been effective. The only limitation I have run into is the ability to read some 'legacy' html/xml based Excel formats.

Not Open Source, or free unfortunately but it is a workable option.