I am not a coder but need a task done.
We have a website that builds a word doc file using ckeditor based on answers from clients.
This documents needs afterwards to be formatted (TA/TC functions of word) which cannot be done with ckeditor.
Therefore we have a VBA/ macro that needs to be run in MS word after the doc file is generated.
I want to automate this step and have the VBA/macro run, before the doc is send to client.
So from my understanding, you have to take the CKeditor doc, run the macro on the server, and store it in the current database..
Possible or not?
This should not be done server-side. Working with Office applications server-side is not supported - Office applications are end-user applications. They can easily appear to "hang" when used, due to waiting for user input.
More information about using Office on a server can be found here
Possible: theoretically, yes, but impossible for anyone to guarantee as the code and document content are unknown. But, theoretically, if it works on a desktop it can work when run on a server.
The more "correct" way to manipulate Office documents on a server is to work directly with the Office Open XML files, instead of opening them in the application interface. The file formats were designed for this scenario and execution is also much faster. I'm guessing, however, since TC and TA fields are mentioned that the macro also builds TOCs? If yes, then the document would also have to be opened in order to generate the TOC (update the field). Server-side, that would mean using Word Automation Services, which is part of SharePoint.
Related
I am developing a job portal using asp.net. I need to build a control to display the uploaded resume on the browser from the server directory. Could any one share the code to do the same. what is the control appropriate to display the content of a doc file?
Thanks in advance.
There is no ASP.NET server control to display a Word document in a web-page. Microsoft removed the Internet Explorer-only ability to show Word documents in the browser with Office 2007, but before then you could have gotten away with doing it in an <iframe> - note that this does require Word to be installed on the browser's computer.
It sounds like you want to convert the Word document into HTML+CSS. I'll stop you right here, because that is a non-trivial operation, even with the significantly-easier-to-process OOXML file formats. There are commercial libraries that can assist you with this, but they cost $lots. (Bing for "Aspose").
There are a few other alternatives:
Print the document, server-side, to a PDF file. This needs a complicated set-up on the server as the Office COM automation libraries should not be used from headless (e.g. server) code; so you'd need to set-up some kind of GUI-session daemon to do this processing.
Accept only the OOXML file formats and extract only plaintext content (this can be done easily enough without much knowledge of OOXML if you already have experience with manipulating XML in-code).
Accept only plaintext or HTML submissions. This is how most "upload your resume" sites work, including Apple's and Microsoft's careers websites.
If you just want to return the Word document to your visitors, then just return the raw bytes of the file using Response.WriteFile, or write directly to the Response's output stream if you're persisting the Word document outside of the filesystem.
I'm making a web app. Part of it includes the automatic generation of word documents (letters). Those documents need to be opened by the end user, then saved back to the server once they've finished editing.
I tried using webdav for this but the only browser I could actually launch word from (using active-x) was IE. I also found a plugin for firefox, but for Chrome I couldn't find a way that worked.
Next I thought about making the clients map a drive to webdav (or similar), then offering up the files as file://... links, but that only works if the webpage is on the local machine.
Before I resort to ditching word (the clients won't like this) and using CKEditor or TinyMCE, is there another way?
In short, I'd like to have links to a document on the page, which when clicked are opened in word, but the file should stay remote - and then when saving, it's the remote file that gets updated.
I've also looked at Zoho but it could be very expensive for this project, plus I don't think it can be white-labelled and also looks a bit old fashioned, UI wise.
Maybe Sharepoint can do what I need? Haven't looked at that much. Also thought of making a client app to run in the system tray and deal with things.
If there was a decent way of editing Word docs from within the browser with something like CKEditor/TinyMCE and once finished, conversion back to Word format actually worked 100%, that would suffice.
I'm open to totally fresh ideas if anyone has any...
Currently Chrome, Firefox and Safari support MS Office plugin. They can open and save documents directly to server. I have tested this with MS Office 2007 and MS Office 2007 just about a month ago.
Ideally, your users would be able to use Word natively. Is there any chance you could create an Office Add-In that hooks into the BeforeDocumentSave event, looks for some indicator that the file is associated with your application, and save the updated file to your server?
Saving to the server via the Word Add-In would probably need to include some unique identifier (in addition to file name), so you could overwrite the previous version server-side. Then, if you were using something like SignalR, you could trigger a refresh on the web page when the file was saved successfully (assuming they were still on that web page) on the server (via FileSystemWatcher).
Had same problem myself.
I solved it by setting up a webdav share on the server with digest authentication (SabreDAV), and tied it into the users table on my app backend.
In relation to the client end, I solved accessing this by creating a small java applet which uses the java Desktop class (getDesktop().open()) to open the file. You will need to make sure the path is handled right for the client machine type (Windows, OS X or Linux)
You will also need to get your end users to permanently mount or map the webdav share locally.
Is it possible in any way to edit an excel sheet through an ASP.net page that contains macro. I have tried to open the Excel sheet and it seems to just hang rather than load the excel. Testing on a page without macros works perfectly fine?
Disclaimer: I don't know the Excel license agreement and I don't know if utilizing Excel in a server process violates it or not. This is purely a technical description of how to get it working. The reader is advised to check the license agreement to see if it's allowed to do so or not. Different Office versions may have different license agreements. I used this method at several Fortune 100/500 companies and they didn't seem to care. Go figure.
This solution works but it has some limitations and require a fair amount of control over the server where it runs. The server also needs to have lots of memory.
To start, make sure that you perform a complete installation of every single Office feature on the server so that Excel won't try to install something if you attempt to use a feature that's not present.
You also need to create a dedicated user account on the server that has the right privileges. I can't tell you what exactly because in my case we controlled the server and we gave admin rights to this user.
When you have the user account, you need to log in as that user and run Excel (preferably all Office applications) at least once so that it can create its settings.
You also need to configure Excel to run under this user account when it's created as a COM object. For this, you need to go into DCOM Config on the server and configure Launch and Activation Permissions for the Excel.Application object to use your new user account. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but I think after this step, running Excel as an interactive user was slightly problematic.
By default, Office applications try to display various messages on the screen: warnings, questions, etc. These must be turned off because when you utilize an Office application from a web application, it runs on the server so a human user won't be around to dismiss these messages - the Office program will just sit around indefinitely, waiting for the message to be dismissed.
You need to set (at the minimum) these properties:
DisplayAlerts = false
AskToUpdateLinks = false
AlertBeforeOverwriting = false
Interactive = false
Visible = false
FeatureInstall = 0 'msoFeatureInstallNone
to disable UI messages from Excel. If you use Excel 2010, there may be more, but I'm not familiar with that.
If you have Excel files with macros in them, you may have to disable macro security in Excel - that can't be done programmatically, for obvious reasons.
To access Excel services, implement a manager object that will actually hold the Excel reference - don't try to hold the Excel.Application object in the page because your page code will become very complicated and you may not be able to properly clean things up.
The object that holds the Excel reference may be a separate DLL or an out-of-process server. You must make sure, however, that when you acquire an instance of Excel on a given thread you always create a new Excel instance. The default is that an already running Excel instance will also serve other requests but that won't work for you because the same Excel instance cannot be shared among multiple threads. Each request-processing thread in IIS must have its own Excel instance - if you share instances, you'll have all kinds of problems. This means that your server will need to have quite a bit of memory to have many instances of Excel running. This was not an issue for me becasue we controlled the server.
If you can, try to create an out-of-proc (.exe) COM server because this way you can hold the Excel reference in a separate process. It's possible to get it working using an in-proc (.dll) COM object but it'll be more risky to your application pool - if Excel crashes, it'll crash your app pool as well.
When you have an .exe server, you can pass parameters in several possible ways:
Make your manager objet a COM object and pass parameters as properties.
Pass parameters as command-line parameteres to the .exe as it starts up.
Pass parameters in a text/binary file; pass the name of the file on the command-line.
I used all these and found the COM object option the cleanest.
In your manager object, follow these guidelines:
Wrap every single function that uses Excel in a try..catch block to capture any possible exception.
Always explicitly release all Excel objects by calling Marshal.ReleaseComObject() and then setting your variables to null as soon as you don't need them. Always release these objects in a finally block to make sure that a failed Excel method call won't result in a dangling COM object.
If you try to use any formatting features in Excel (page header, margins, etc.) you must have a printer installed and accessible to the user account that you use to run Excel. If you don't have an active printer (preferably attached to the server), formatting-related features may not work.
When an error happens, close the Excel instance that you're using. It's not likely that you can recover from Excel-related errors and the longer you keep the instance, the longer it uses resources.
When you quit Excel, make sure that you guard that code against recursive calls - if your exception handlers try to shut down Excel while your code is already in the process of shutting down Excel, you'll end up with a dead Excel instance.
Call GC.Collect() and GC.WaitForPendingFinalizers() right after calling the Application.Quit() method to make sure that the .NET Framework releases all Excel COM objects immediately.
Edit: John Saunders may have a point regarding the license agreement - I can't advise about that. The projects that I did using Word/Excel were all intranet applications at large clients and the requirement to use Word/Excel was a given.
The link he provided also has some tools that may be useful, although those libraries won't have full Excel functionality and if that's what you need, you don't have a choice. If you don't need full Excel functionality, check out those libraries - they may be much simpler to use.
A few links that may be useful to people trying to implement this approach:
StackOverflow question
Possible alternate products
COM server activation and window stations
The story changed a little while ago, with HPC Services for Excel.
With that, you can do Office Automation on a web server. I'm still trying to determine how it fits my situation, but you may want to check it out.
I have a .jpg file which represents the current image from a webcam. User's will be downloading this file at an interval of once a second. Because there could be dozens of users reading it, this could be dozens of times a second (which is normal for any web server).
Problem is, this image is updated by a 3rd party application also once a second which "spiders" my local networks webcam portal image. This is so we can build our webcams into our current administration panel.
The problem I am already finding is ASP.net sometimes gets an error it can not access the file because it is open for write permissions by the bot. Likewise, the bot can not access it because IIS is feeding it to the user.
The bot uses io.streamwriter to save the data to the file, and my script uses Response.WriteFile to send the file to the script. (I need to use an actual ASP.net page with a JPG content-type that feeds the file to make sure only users with a active session can view the JPG).
My question is what is the best practices for this? I know why it's happening but what is the best resolution for this? Would storing as a BLOB in a database maybe be smarter since databases are created for concurrent read/writing already? Is there an easier way of doing this with a file I have not thought of yet?
Thanks in advance,
Anthony Greco
Using a BLOB will work if the readers use SNAPSHOT isolation model (SQL Server 2005 and up). See Download and Upload images from SQL Server via ASP.Net MVC for how to stream an image from a BLOB, and see Understanding Row Versioning-Based Isolation Levels for a lecture on SNAPSHOT.
But using a BLOB may be overkill, you could get away with something much simpler. For instance, if you only have one ASP.Net process, then you could have a global volatile variable for the current file name. The writer writes the JPG into a new file, and then updates the global 'current' file name with an Interlocked.CompareExchange operation (it has to be Compare because a newer writer might actually finish faster, outrun a previous writer, and you want to preserve the latest update). There are still some issues left to solve (find out the file name at startup, clean up old files etc) but they are all fairly ease to solve.
If you have a farm of servers, or multiple ASP.Net processes serving the site, then things could get complicated. I would still do a rotating file name and do a try-and-error approach (try to respond with newest file, fall back to previous older one if conflict is detected).
You could get the bot to write the data to a different filename and then do a delete and rename to the filename being served by ASP.Net. This should reduce the file lock time down to the time for a delete and rename to occur. To clarify:
ASP.Net serving image from "webcam.jpg"
bot writes image data to "temp.jpg"
when last image byte written, bot deletes "webcam.jpg" and renames "temp.jpg" to "webcam.jpg"
ASP.Net should check "webcam.jpg" exists, if not wait 10ms (or suitable small increment) and check again.
I checked in the API, that writing a file is only in Flex Air.
Despite of that, is there still a way in Flex to write a file on the server or on the client machine ?
More concretely, it's because I have a String and I will decode it by mx.utils.Base64Decoder
to a doc. And I need to open it by Word directly on the client side, or write it on the server and return the link to the client for downloading.
Thanks
I'm doing something similar - I have built a custom grid in Flex that contains an additional button on it that allows the user to open the data up in Excel. I've done this by writing a function in PHP on the server which my Flex speaks to. This creates the CSV file on the server and the function passes the link back to the client, which in turn offers the user the chance to open the data up in Excel.
I'm using the Zend technologies to accomplish this - I recommend you take a look; they're extremely good. I used to use Flex Data Services and Java do do this but just recently switched to PHP because development time is cut down drastically as a result.
Hope this helps.
Jamie.
AIR applications run on the users' desktops. They allow you to write to the users' desktops. Nothing stops Flex/AIR applications from communicating to the server, write some files there (using a suitable backend technology) and return a link back to the user.