Data storage in Excel

Hi,
I am doing a personal project of customizing excel 2007 using add-ins in visual studio 2005. I have a dataset storing some values and need to map the values to excel cells. Once the excel file is saved and closed, these mappings should be retained while reopening the file. Is it possible to achieve this kind of data storage which would be saved as a part of the excel file?

Thanks,
Dhruvan.

Hi,
To make it clearer, I have a dataset, it has two columns, one is a "header" column and the other is the "value" column. An example row would be,
FirstName _____(value)
Now, the value of firstname has to be entered in the excel sheet. I need to map this dataset cell to an excel cell in such a way that any change in that excel cell would be reflected back into the dataset cell.

The problem does not end here. Once I get this done, I save the file and close it. When I open the file again, the mapping should still be available. The thing is, I am programming an add-in. The add-ins and all the objects within it (including the dataset) are re-initialized whenever the excel is started. So, how do I retain the mappings? Is their any way of storing such information along with the excel file itself which would be unique to that file.

I hope it is clearer now

Thanks,
Dhruvan.

Hi,

Theoretically it is always possible to save (serialize) the state of an object (add-in) and to recover later the object in its state when saved.

In addition, Excel offers you a natural storage for data: the excel sheets. Another natural storage in Excel would be a VBA module that would -somehow- recover the state of the object by some commands.

However the implementation of such mechanism might lead you to a lot of work, and an additional obstacle is the absence of any infrastructure in excel for this kind of operation. (this is to my knowledge so up to Excel 2003, you could try to know more about the possibilities of Excel 2007.)

The serialisation "infrastructure" is available in many languages (api). I know best Java in this respect, but C# or J# offers these possibilities without any doubt. Maybe VB.net offers you such a possibility too.

It might also be possible to get this work done without a full "serialisation" api.

However, I think that you might need a faster and pactical solution.

Again, without more details it is nearly impossible to give you a sensible answer.

I have found a possible solution, it is data caching in excel. The msdn reference is http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa722523.aspx

But, here again I am getting the problem that I am not able to get it to work. I tried executing the code given in the link, but am getting a null-reference exception at the "me.IsCached("dataset1")" line.

Let me know if you are able to get it to work or if there is any similar way to perform this functionality.

Thanks,
Dhruvan.

I would be quite interrested, but I am having two problem now:

- I am using XL2003
- the reference you gave is apparently unrelated,
its tile is "Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 3 of "Customizing the 2007 Office Fluent Ribbon for Developers (Part 3 of 3)"

Could you check,
thanks

My mistake.... The appropriate link is...
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...f3(VS.80).aspx

And as for this caching, it is for 2003 and so it should very well hold for 2007 also....

Thanks,
Dhruvan.