I would go with opening a new browser window that returns the data in the format that you want, so that implies server side.
The other thing that I would recommend for exporting, simply use CSV files. Most business and marketing type users are happy with that, because Excel opens files with csv extension by default, so they think it's an Excel file anyway. Also from my experience the reason they want to export the data is so they can manipulate it and create their own graphs in Excel. For PDF there are many cheap server side technologies that will generate a PDF based on an HTML template. Perry From: Greg Keogh Sent: Sunday, February 28, 2010 3:05 AM To: 'ozSilverlight' Subject: Generating Office/PDF documents Folks, this is just vague "thinking aloud" post to get ideas about an upcoming problem. The current SL3 app I'm writing simulates a subset of the rich functionality of desktop app written in Borland C++. The desktop app has a feature to "export" statistical data to Excel or PowerPoint, and on the desktop this works very smoothly because they have full COM and Win32 control and it's all trusted. I was asked today if this "Export" feature could be available in Silverlight. All I could think of was: * Server Side - The docx, pptx or pdf files are generated on the server and stored in web server folders where the client user can see them listed and perhaps click on them to open them. This is common with ASP.NET apps where you generate report files and let the user either open them manually or feed them back into the response stream and open them in a new browser window. I don't know how a Silverlight app would force a browser window to open with a server side generated report. * Client side - We'd have to assume that the client has the required software, and Silverlight would need permission to reach out of its sandbox to write to the file system or to manipulate Office via COM. Which all sounds improbable, unless SL4 can help. Any general discussion or ideas on this would be welcome. Cheers, Greg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ ozsilverlight mailing list [email protected] http://prdlxvm0001.codify.net/mailman/listinfo/ozsilverlight
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