Export ASP.NET Control to Microsoft Excel

With server-side code, you can bind the ASP.NET control (for example datagrid or repeater) to your data and have the data open in Excel on a client computer with one button-click. To do this, set the ContentType to application/vnd.ms-excel. Also - it is important to set Content-Disposition response header to be "attachment". After that the control is simply rendered with StringWriter and HtmlTextWriter.

• webform markup:
  

  < form id="myForm" method="post" runat="server">
     < input type="button" name="btnExcel" value="excel"
        onclick="navframe.location.href='MyPage.aspx?e=1';">
     < iframe type="hidden" src="" 
        style="display:none;" name="navframe">< /iframe>
     < asp:datagrid id="grdResult" runat="server">< /asp:datagrid>
  < /form>
  

• codebehind Page_Load event:
  

  protected System.Web.UI.WebControls.DataGrid grdResult;
  
  private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
  {
  
      grdResult.DataBind();
  
      if (String.Equals(Request.QueryString["e"], "1"))
      {
          Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
          Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", 
              "attachment; filename=ExcelFile.xls");
  
          Response.BufferOutput = true;
          Response.ContentEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;
          Response.Charset = "UTF-8";
          EnableViewState = false;
  
          System.IO.StringWriter tw = new System.IO.StringWriter();
          System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter hw = 
              new System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter(tw);
  
          grdResult.RenderControl(hw);
  
          Response.Write(tw.ToString());
          Response.End();
      }
  }
  

Please note a small trick how iframe is used in this sample to redirect response and get really flexible and reliable UI.

Related Posts:

• SMTP Authentication Using System.Web.Mail [ aka CDOSYS ]
• Data Access Approach to Implement Multilingual ASP.NET Application
• Asp.Net: Authentication based on HTTP Digest protocol. Module Enhancement.
• Asp.Net: Authentication based on HTTP Basic protocol. HttpModule.

I get a blank excel file. I wonder if it is because my datagrid is bound to a datareader rather than a datasource. hmm