Revium

One request we always seem to come across as developers is “Can we have a version of the page avaliable as a Word Document?”. With traditional ASP.Net this is easy. Simply place something similar to the following code block in your Page_Load.

Response.Clear();
Response.Buffer = true;
Response.ContentType = "application/ms-word";
StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
HtmlTextWriter htmlTextWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter);
this.RenderControl(htmlTextWriter);
Response.Write(stringWriter.ToString());
Response.End();

And that was it. Now using Asp.Net MVC it isn’t that simple. We somehow need to return this data in the form of an ActionResult. I did this by creating: 2 Controllers 1 View and 1 new ActionResult Class.

First the 2 Views: DetailedReport and DetailedReportWord.

/// <summary>
/// This view is used to display the web version of the report as a web page in the users browser
/// This Controller has a View named DetailedReport
/// </summary>
public ActionResult DetailedReport()
{
    //[...]
    return View();
}

/// <summary>
/// This view is used convert the DetailedReport view into a Word Document and send it to the user
/// This Controller does not have an associated View
/// </summary>
public ActionResult DetailedReportWord()
{
    string url = "http://localhost/Reports/DetailedReport";
    return WordActionResult.Word(url, "detailed-report.doc");
}

Now for the new ActionResult Class: WordActionResult. This class will take a URL and execute a HttpRequest. The resulting content is then streamed to the users as a Word Document

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.UI;

namespace Revium.Utilities.MVC
{
    public class WordActionResult : ActionResult
    {
        private string _url;
        public string url
        {
            get { return _url; }
        }

        private string _filename;
        public string fileName
        {
            get { return _filename; }
        }

        public WordActionResult(string pUrl, string pFileName)
        {
            _url = pUrl;
            _filename = pFileName;
        }

        public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)
        {
            HttpContext curContext = HttpContext.Current;
            curContext.Response.Clear();
            curContext.Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment;filename=" + _filename);
            curContext.Response.Charset = "";
            curContext.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
            curContext.Response.ContentType = "application/ms-word";

            HttpWebRequest wreq = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(_url);
            HttpWebResponse wres = (HttpWebResponse)wreq.GetResponse();
            Stream s = wres.GetResponseStream();
            StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(s, Encoding.ASCII);

            curContext.Response.Write(sr.ReadToEnd());
            curContext.Response.End();
        }
    }
}

Now you may notice that ExecuteResult is a little different to the example i gave right at the start. This is because we are not converting the current view to a Word document. We are using the DetailedResultWord Controller to convert DetaileResult to a Word document.

This is just a very simple implementation but it has certainly given us the stepping stones required to convert MVC Views to Word and Excel documents.