Exporting Charts on to a Web Page

**mattdick** · 05-21-2009, 09:48 AM

Hi all,

I want to give users the ability to fill out a web form and get a few dynamically-generated charts to display on the web. I have the excel macro-ing done, and I have a website with a form that can take input and make SQL queries in ASP, so my connection the the database is solid.

I was hoping for a strategy discussion: does it make sense (and is there a way), to invoke excel from an ASP script to open, run some numbers, generate graphs and then export them for display? I imagine this is possible, but before I go into too much work I was hoping to hear from the experiences here to find out if anyone has had success doing this type of thing in the past and what route they went and what they would recommend.

Thanks.

**mattdick** · 05-21-2009, 02:02 PM

I should add that I'm not wedded to any aspect of this (other than the Excel processing, I want to use the Excel for graphing), but I can script this with anything...

Thanks again.

**Andy Pope** · 05-22-2009, 05:09 AM

Running the Excel Application on a server is not recommended.
If the app ever puts up a dialog you will have no way of responding to it and your process will simply lock up.

If you are using xl2007 then you can write directly to the xml sections of the file. And you can do this without the need of Excel.

You might also want to look into Excel Services.

**mattdick** · 05-22-2009, 09:48 AM

Running the Excel Application on a server is not recommended.
If the app ever puts up a dialog you will have no way of responding to it and your process will simply lock up.

Okay, I can let that go.

If you are using xl2007 then you can write directly to the xml sections of the file. And you can do this without the need of Excel.

All right, I can do that, I guess the followup question is, if I go the direction of writing xml, how best do I then display the results?

In the end, am I better off finding another way to display a graph on line?

**Andy Pope** · 05-22-2009, 10:09 AM

I have not done this myself. Anything that appears on the web is constructed in a controlled desktop environment.

Maybe some of these will help.

Integrating Excel (Services) and PowerPoint with the Microsoft SDK for Open XML Formats.
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/...l-formats.aspx

Excel services
http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/...r/default.aspx

Maybe look at google
http://www.dailydoseofexcel.com/arch...gle-chart-api/

Building Excel 2007 and Excel Services Dashboards by Consuming Two-Dimensional Data from Web Services
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc539928.aspx

How To Use Server-Side Charting to Generate Charts Dynamically
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244049

**mattdick** · 05-22-2009, 10:11 AM

Thanks, Andy!

**njbox** · 12-24-2009, 12:19 PM

are you looking for static html report containing charts or you want the ability for users to filter on the web page and get dynamci charts?

NJ

**mattdick** · 12-24-2009, 01:17 PM

are you looking for static html report containing charts or you want the ability for users to filter on the web page and get dynamci charts?

The idea was for a user to grab his name from a list, and then I'd use that as input to grab that user's data from a database.

What I ended up doing was using the google charting API. It has its limitations, but it ended up being pretty effective. The graphs are nice-looking if not quite as flexible as I'd like.