Arjang, Indeed it is challenging, the reason for using Excel is that the users are in a remote part of the Pilbara, one office is sharing a 64k or 128k (ISDN?) connection and another group is sharing a telstra 3G card across an entire office of about 15 to 20 staff. We had previously used FarPoint Spread ASP.NET component, so that end users could cut and paste from their spreadsheets into it and do validation before uploading (we put a validation button on the web page for them), but we were getting lots of technical issues due to the low connection speeds.
Hence emailing in via Excel became the only viable option for giving close to real-time data feedback in a reliable manner. Data validation is done in the webservice that is also polling the email for new emails. The results are sent back via email - which is a more reliable transport mechanism than ASP.NET. The system also internally generates Alerts and multiple users can see these so that all errors can be rectified before they are finalised. Andrew ---------------------------------------- From: "Arjang Assadi" <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, 22 February 2011 7:04 AM To: [email protected], "ozDotNet" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Excel in .NET (C# or VB) On 21 February 2011 18:08, Andrew McGrath <[email protected]> wrote: > Using xlsgen to manage situation very similar to yours. Has worked very well > on a variety of projects. > > Website is at http://xlsgen.arstdesign.com/ > > Andrew Hi Andrew, How did you manage the data validation? There is pretty much no way of enforcing business rules on any data being entered into excel. Doing data validation and integrity checking after receiving it is a waking nighmare. Is/Are there recomended practices of having some control over the data in Excel? Regards Arjang
