Hi all,

We are looking for the best way to bring the data to Office. The idea is to export the data from the (web) application to XML and read the XML (together with a custom schema) in Office 2003, allowing the user to build his own templates.

Is there anyone who tried this already and is willing to share some experiences?

Also, I noticed the entityCollection's WriteXml() method produces XML that contains a lot of unneeded information. Is there an easy way to produce less verbose XML?

The xml produced is indeed very verbose, this will be changed soon (as in: other methods to produce less verbose XML).

if you want less verbose xml, you could opt for reading the data into a datatable, and export that to xml, using the methods to load entity data in datatables (it depends on what you use: adapter or selfservicing what you should use) As the destination is Office, you can't use the entities there anyway.

Otis wrote:

if you want less verbose xml, you could opt for reading the data into a datatable, and export that to xml, using the methods to load entity data in datatables (it depends on what you use: adapter or selfservicing what you should use) As the destination is Office, you can't use the entities there anyway.

Hmmm, I thought you would say that.... Correct me if i'm wrong, but that would result in having the same data twice in memory.

If office realy cannot cope with the entities is just what we are investigating. Office 2003 offers support for custom schema.

wvnoort wrote:

Otis wrote:

if you want less verbose xml, you could opt for reading the data into a datatable, and export that to xml, using the methods to load entity data in datatables (it depends on what you use: adapter or selfservicing what you should use) As the destination is Office, you can't use the entities there anyway.

Hmmm, I thought you would say that.... Correct me if i'm wrong, but that would result in having the same data twice in memory.

Export to xml and than drop the original objects keeps the data in memory once.