How can I write to an Excel spreadsheet using Linq?

Question

I\'m writing an app where I need to retrieve some rows from a DB and dump them into an Excel spreadsheet. I\'m using Linq to retrieve these rows.

Is it possible to

Answer 1

There's no direct way to connect these two. It sounds like you want LINQ to SQL to handle the query generation, but not the O/R mapping (because Excel wouldn't know what to do with the objects that come out of LINQ- they don't look like data rows any more). You can do that first part by calling (datacontext).GetCommand(yourLinqQueryHere), then running that as the CommandText in a SqlCommand. Call ExecuteReader(), then GetSchemaTable() to figure out the order of the columns. Then (assuming you're automating Excel) pass the result of (DbDataReader).GetValues() to Excel's (Worksheet).Row[x].Values and it'll splat the results in. You might need to reorder stuff. If you're not automating Excel, you'd need to dump the values in using the Jet OLEDB provider for Excel with an OleDbConnection, or use a 3rd party component to generate the spreadsheet.