[Solved] Excel parse with copy/paste

[Marc]

Our silverlight application needs the ability to read and parse excel files. At first we were going to upload to the server and have the processing done on there. But we can make it more intuitive if it's done on the client.

Is there a way with the radgrid copy/paste clipboard functionality to paste data into an empty grid which we could then process on the client?

[Yavor Georgiev]

Hello Marc,

 RadGridView's copy/paste functionality expects that the pasting GridView will already be populated with columns. However, from what I understand of your scenario, you wish to parse a document whose structure can vary and is not set.

 Our experience working with Excel's clipboard in Silverlight shows that when pasting to a Silverlight application, the Excel data from the clipboard is accessed in a tab-separated values format - like CSV, but with tabs instead of commas. What you can do is ask the user to copy the cells from the Excel file and press a button in your application, whose handler calls Clipboard.GetText(). You can easily parse this text into, say, our lightweight Silverlight DataTable and work with it.

Sincerely yours,
Yavor Georgiev
the Telerik team