Archive For June 2015

Reading Excel Files Without Saving To Disk In ASP.NET

calendar_today 30 June 2015 14:47

ASP.NET Web Forms EPPlus

This article allows me the opportunity to demonstrate a feature of my newest favourite open source library: EPPlus. EPPlus is a .net library that reads and writes Excel 2007+ files using the Open Office Xml format (xlsx). This fantastic, easy to use (and free) library enables the use of Excel in ASP.NET applications without the need to install the Access Database Engine (ACE) or having to mess about with unsupported Office Automation on the web server (assuming you can even get Office installed there). Prompted by a rash of similar questions that appeared on the ASP.NET forums recently, this article looks at reading the contents of an uploaded Excel file without saving it, and displaying the data in a Web Forms GridView.

Entity Framework Recipe: Many To Many Relationship On The Same Table

calendar_today 18 June 2015 13:56

Entity Framework

This article looks at how to configure Entity Framework to manage many to many relationships based on the same table. This scenario arises the same entity is related to itself in a different role. An example is the related product feature you might see in a "People also bought" section of an ecommerce site. Another is the relationship between clients and agencies in the advertising and marketing world. That scenario will form the basis of the illustration below.