Exporting A DataList To MS Word

[gowens]

I have an ASP.Net multi-part tabbed page. One of the tab pages contains
several controls (including a DataList). The DataList contains,
virtually-rendered, Database images and some text fields. We'd like to
take the content and format of the DataList to create a Word document
(album) for the end-users.

Is it possible to export the DataList (HTML table, data, etc) to a MS
Word document? I haven't found anything that is very clear or helpful
yet.

All suggestions welcome.

Glenn

 

[Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]]

You might be able to use this free ExportPanel control to do it:
http://SteveOrr.net/articles/exportpanel.aspx

 

[gowens]

Steve, thanks for your quick reply. What a great idea (wish I'd thought
of it)!

Out of the box the ExportPanel was able to capture the table format,
text and checkbox input controls for header, body and footer templates
of the datalist control (fantastic!!). The one thing that it didn't
capture was the images (required).

As I had mentioned, the images on the web page are dynamically
generated from a database. The images are cached with a unique
identifier (GUID) and the web page uses a custom HTTPHandler,
implementing IHTTPHandler and using the ProcessRequest method
implementation, to retrieve the cached images and stream them into the
page content via the :

HttpContext.Current.Response.ContentType = "image/jpeg"
HttpContext.Current.Response.OutputStream.Write(img, 0, img.Length)

(where img is a byte array).

So, I'm wondering, without too much customization, is there something
that you could suggest so that the ExportPanel could also capture the
dynamic images (which are never saved to disk)?

Thanks for your help!!!
Glenn

 

[Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]]

Assuming the URLs to the image will always work, you can just use it.
Make sure you have the full, absolute URL, not a relative URL to the image.