Formatting / Post Processing of Exported Excel Sheet

Question

Hi ,
Issue:
The Columns in the Excel Sheet are not fully visible when we export Report from CR viewer  to Excel Sheet. So we had planned for Post processing of the Excel Sheet using VBA or .NET etc to format the Excel Sheet, which would be on the server side, meaning the End user will never see the formatting process, but only the End Report. Is it possible to achieve this ??
NOTE:
1) VBA or .NET could not be run on the Linux Server but we could take advantage of the windows server in the presentation layer.
Architecture:  
Presentation Layer                    
Linux Server <--> Windows .Net Server <--
> End User
{Crystal RAS Server} <-->{GUI CR Viewer Application}<--
>
Our Proposed Solution:
1) Create an GUI Application that has CR viewer in it .
2) Create a Separate Excel Export button on the webpage.
3) when the user wants to export the report , he clicks the button.
4) The GUI/ application saves the Exported Excel Sheet from the Ras server to the windows server.
5) Then the .Net or the Vba code is applied to process/Format the Excel Sheet.
6) When complete the End user is prompted for saving the report to a local disk.
My questions:
1) Can this be achieved ?
2) what would be the best way to handle this ?
3) what should be the process flow ?
4) what are the things to be considered while planning for such a design ?
Regards,
Ramkumar Govindasamy

Answer 1

So you're looking at using RAS .NET SDK on the Application Layer to export a Crystal Report to Excel, save to temp file on the Application Layer machine, process that temp file, and stream that back out to the client web browser.
Considerations:
1. You need to create your own custom UI button to trigger the process, since the .NET Web Forms Crystal Reports viewer won't have the hooks to customize the Excel export.
2. Running Excel VBA from your Web App may be problematic - you'd have to be particularly careful if the system is under load, since the Excel VBA - COM-Interop isn't necessarily designed for high throughput.  Under high load, you may get file locking or COM-Interop layer just refuse to process.  It's pretty common to try and catch exceptions and retry if you encounter this.
You'd likely not find anyone here familiar with 2 above, but 1 is fairly common.
Sincerely,
Ted Ueda