How to send an excel workbook as an response?

Question

I am trying to create an excel sheet in a code-behind and then download it. I don't want to save the file on the disk, I want to directly send it as a response, I tried the following code. But im not getting the exact excel.

Excel.Application xlApp;
            Excel.Workbook xlWorkBook;
            Excel.Worksheet xlWorkSheet;
            object misValue = System.Reflection.Missing.Value;


            xlApp = new Excel.ApplicationClass();
            xlWorkBook = xlApp.Workbooks.Add(misValue);
            xlWorkSheet = (Excel.Worksheet)xlWorkBook.Worksheets.get_Item(1);

            for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
                for (int j = 1; j < 100; j++)
                    xlWorkSheet.Cells[i, j] = i + "  : " + j;

            Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
            Response.AppendHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=translationText.xls");
            this.EnableViewState = false;
            Response.Write(xlWorkSheet);
            Response.End();

            xlWorkBook.Close(true, misValue, misValue);
            xlApp.Quit();

            releaseObject(xlWorkSheet);
            releaseObject(xlWorkBook);
            releaseObject(xlApp);

How to send the excel worksheet object as the response. So, that user will be prompted to download the excel file

Just my gut feeling, but does writing `xlWorkSheet` to the response actually do anything? At best I can see it sending the `.ToString()` of the object, not the contents of the object. You probably want to try and save the work book into a memory stream, and send that instead — freefaller, Oct 15 '12 at 14:02

score 6 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 15 '12 at 13:59

6

Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
Response.AppendHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; filename=translationText.xls");
Response.Write("<table>");
for (int i = 1; i <= 100; i++)
{
    Response.Write("<tr>");
    for (int j = 1; j < 100; j++)
    {
        Response.Write("<td>"+i + "  : " + j+"</td>");            
    }
    Response.Write("</tr>");
}
Response.Write("</table>");
Response.Flush();
Response.End();

try the above code, you dont need to create an excel object here, if you are reading from an excel and then writing it is different code.

well the different code to read and write the excel file to the browser is by

Response.BinaryWrite(yourexcelstream)

answered Oct 15 '12 at 13:59

Chandra Sekhar Walajapet

2,534
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Yes i know this method. But i want to do formatting of cells also, so I guess I have to go for excel only – Rajneesh Oct 15 '12 at 14:01
what kind of formatting are you looking for ? if its just styling then you can go with css attributes for td(cell) – Chandra Sekhar Walajapet Oct 15 '12 at 14:01
Can you give a snippet of how to get an array of bytes from xlWorkSheet object which I created? – Rajneesh Oct 15 '12 at 14:19
1

well look at this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8201774/convert-excel-workbook-to-byte , please come back tomorrow and mark my answer as correct, coz i have already gained enough points for today! – Chandra Sekhar Walajapet Oct 15 '12 at 14:23

How to send an excel workbook as an response?

1 Answers1