Export to Excel Timeout!

[Mike]

I have a grid with 20 columns and around 8,000 rows.  It takes about 30 seconds to load and timesout when I try to export to excel.  What would cause this to timeout?

protected void ButtonExcel_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
   {
       RadGrid Grid1 = (RadGrid)Page.Master.FindControl("Main").FindControl("RadGrid1");
       Grid1.ExportSettings.ExportOnlyData = true;
       Grid1.ExportSettings.IgnorePaging = true;
       Grid1.ExportSettings.OpenInNewWindow = true;
       Grid1.MasterTableView.ExportToExcel();
   }

Does anyone else have a problem with performance and exporting to excel?

[Cori]

Hello Michael,

Have you tried increasing the executionTimeout in the httpRuntime section in your web.config file? You can view the details on this MSDN article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e1f13641.aspx

I've never experienced a time out when exporting to excel, but I'm assuming it's due to the amount of columns/records your exporting.

I hope that helps.

[Mike]

Cori,
Thanks, but I have it timing out at fifteen minutes and I am not wanting to increase it anymore.  What I ended up doing was export to CSV instead of Excel, it still opens Excel and only takes a few seconds and the file size is much smaller.... probably because it doesn't push all that HTML even though I have exportdataonly = true.

[Cori]

Does changing the Excel export type from HTML to ExcelML, change anything?

[Daniel]

Hello guys,

In some scenarios the ExcelML format will be faster than HTML although it is still no match for the CSV format. A possible way to speedup the export process it to create another RadGrid on-the-fly (it should be added to the controls collection even though it won't be visible) and bind it with a limited set of data (I recommend that you reduce the number of columns).

Regards,
Daniel
the Telerik team

[Mike]

I would love to tell the customer to reduce the number of columns.... but they are not going to buy it!  They want even more columns.

[Daniel]

Hello Michael,

If you are not satisfied with the built-in exporting capabilities you can use a third-party exporting library such as NPOI. The following code-library could be used as a starting point:
Export to Excel with third-party library (NPOI)

If this is not suitable for you, I recommend that you try the built-in CSV format.

Best regards,
Daniel
the Telerik team