Microsoft Office (Excel) & COM

[phillyman]

Has anyone had any experience referencing Microsoft Office applications in an server-side COM object? I'm writing a small intranet application, with maybe 10 total users, that uses a server-side COM object to create an Excel spreadsheet from an ADO recordset. That spreadsheet is then downloaded to the user's computer through an ASP page.
Our system guys are really unsure about installing Office on the webserver because it isn't really supported by Microsoft as a server app. Has anyone had any experience using Microsoft Office components on the server?

Thanks,
Scott Wilkinson

 

[Shuchi]

Hi,
We had a similer req. in our application where an excel file needed to be uploaded into sql srver DB using an MTS component. Our IIS server was installed on different machine. On our MTS server , we had installed MS Excel ( there is abs no problem in doing that)
Now , we have created a VC++ component which has ASP calls in it( Response and Request objects) Its funcationality is excatly the same (like in ASP, file gets transferred from client to the server using Request and Response objects, Same way this component transfers the file from client to MTS(directly)
The basic flow:
Client selects the file from local machine. In our ASP file , there is an object of VC component which transfers the file from client to MTS server and then anothere method of the component uploads the file into table

I don't know if this helps but if u want i can provide the VC code also

 

[phillyman]

Thanks Shuchi!!

I think I can handle the code, but I was really curious about the performance of Excel in MTS. I don't think that the office components are multi-threaded, so I figured there may be a problem when multiple instances of Excel are needed at the same time.
Have you had any performance issues running your component on the MTS server? From what I've read, it seems like everything went well. Do you have a lot of activity on the box?

Thanks for the assistance.

Scott Wilkinson

 

[Shuchi]

Abs Not a single perfomance issue
I think about 100 users are accessing this application and app 20-30 users upload the file at the same time. Till now we have not faced any problems . Yes sometimes the system runs slow but thats only b'coz of the n/w traffic.

I don't know what kind of requirements are there for ur system but DTS is another very good option (yes u got to have that installed as part of ur sql server on MTS) but i tell u, that is really really fast. It can download/upload the data from/to table to/from execl/word/access. So, if u can alter the code and check this option , i think it will really work.
( populate a temp. table from ADOrecordset and then use DTS)