The possibilities of consuming web services from Microsoft SharePoint

JamesBowen

JamesBowen

19+ years progress programming and still learning.
Info:
Progress OpenEdge 10.2A
Linux Redhat Platform.

The marketing department creates very complex excel spreadsheets and they want the information/data they produce to be available on the B2B website in the form of a rich web application dashboard.

My first solution was to save the excel spreadsheets to cvs file format and import the data into an OpenEdge database and then use WebSpeed to present the data in combination with jQuery framework.

Due to the shear volume of excel spreadsheets this was proving not to be possible. Also I/marking department could not guarantee the CVS file where would be created equally and the import process would fail into a ball of flames.

Also the business requirements requested that any any data saved should reflect intimidate on the B2B website.

I have started the inverstigate the possiblity of using Microsoft Sharepoint (which I have neaver used) and consume Sharepoints Web Services to extract the data from the excel spreadsheets as and when required. First of all is this even possible? I spent the whole of yesterday trying to get developer information and I'm finding it all a little bit confusing.

So is it possible to extract data from a excel spreadsheet using Microsoft SharePoint Server Web Services?

Or is there an alternative?
 
Thanks for the reply. I've downloaded the zip and tried to use the sample html, however I was unable to get the sample working. Nice idea.
 
Actually, I am flex user not silverlight, so I do not help much.

Flex has external library http://code.google.com/p/as3xls/
But it is limited upto Excel 2003.
It works as follows:
FileReference class is used to read Excel file from disk to binary array.
After this loadFromByteArray method converts Excel file to array of sheets. Sheet.values is ArrayCollection and can be source to Flex DataGrid (table browser). Or can be transfered to Progress through WSA as Input Temp-Table.
 
I've started looking at using some old school COM Object/Automation to extract the data out of a Excel Spreadsheet via an AppServer running on a Windows Machine. I still need to do a prof-of-concept.

I'm currently using the sample code from the PROKB and building gerneral knowledge of COM Objects. However does anybody know a good website which lists the methods and attributes of Microsoft Excel's Automation. The MSDN website sucks.
 
I had to drop the idear of using COM Object/Automation. The uses did not want applications installed on there desktop PC, they only wanted to deal with web app interface. Also because I am using webspeed running on Linux COM Object/Automation it was not a possibility.

My alternative solution is using Google Spreadsheet API & Google Documents API. Using webspeed and in combination of using cURL, I'm planing on uploading a Spreadsheet (excel document) to Google and then using there API tools to extract the information from the spreadsheets.

I know it sounds like alot of work but is the only thing I can think of. However storing and processing the result from Google is going to be a bit of a challenge in it's own.

Google's default feed information is in the form of an atom XML format. It's a complex xml format which progress XSD to ABL tootls can't handle (as always).

Has anyboudy had any real success in using Google's API? (May be I should start a new post???).
 
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