Tim Mackey's Weblog

In my web applications, i occassionaly need to allow the user to export a dataset as an excel file.  I was using a control written by Prashant Nayak posted on Code Project but he released a new version which was problematic for me, so i looked at other solutions.

obinna igbokwe  from  www.dedicatedsolutions.co.uk posted a good approach which creates a DataGrid object and binds it to the dataset, and then Renders the output of the control to the HttpResponse stream.  This works very well.  I have adapted his code to C# and added an option to specify a filename for the excel file.

Here is the code:

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.IO;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

namespace Whatever
{
 /// 

 /// This class provides a method to write a dataset to the HttpResponse as
 /// an excel file. 
 /// 
 public class ExcelExport
 {
  public static void ExportDataSetToExcel(DataSet ds, string filename)
  {
   HttpResponse response = HttpContext.Current.Response;
   
   // first let's clean up the response.object
   response.Clear();
   response.Charset = "";
   
   // set the response mime type for excel
   response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
   response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment;filename=\"" + filename + "\"");
   
   // create a string writer
   using (StringWriter sw = new StringWriter())
   {
    using (HtmlTextWriter htw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw))
    {
     // instantiate a datagrid
     DataGrid dg = new DataGrid();
     dg.DataSource = ds.Tables[0];
     dg.DataBind();
     dg.RenderControl(htw);
     response.Write(sw.ToString());
     response.End(); 
    }
   }
  }
 }
}