When implementing and supporting systems you don't always stick with the cleanest and most elegant solution and one of my common tricks is downright ugly. At least twice a week I find it's necessary to update a set of data from a spreadsheet where it doesn't always make sense to bulk import it into a temporary table. Generally I find the fastest solution is just to use the string concatenation in Excel and write something like this.
="UPDATE Employee Set Email = '" & A1 & "' Where Username = '" & A2 &"'"
The problem with this is
- It can be quite fiddly trying to work out where you made a small mistake and missed a ' or ".
- It's not very usable.
Idea
I wanted to write something which would be similar to how parameters can be bound to a dynamic piece of SQL e.g.
UPDATE Employee Set Email = {1} Where Username = {2}
Then from the type of value in the cell infer whether or not it needs to be wrapped in quotes.
The immediate solution I thought of was the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and I'd write an Addin in C#.
Considering I've never written an Addin this was a pretty stupid thought for a first idea but I decided to carry on.
Stumbling Block One
I should have realised this sooner, all communication with Excel must be done through the COM Primary Interop Assembly interface. Oh good, yet another area I have no experience with. This actually turned out now to be a major issue until a little while later.
First Impressions
This is pretty easy, register an event handler so that I can see when a cell changes and work with it.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
using Office = Microsoft.Office.Core;
using Microsoft.Office.Tools.Excel;
namespace ExcelSQLFormatter
{
public partial class ThisAddIn
{
private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
this.Application.SheetChange += new Excel.AppEvents_SheetChangeEventHandler(Application_SheetChange);
}
void Application_SheetChange(object Sh, Excel.Range Target)
{
Debug.WriteLine("AppEvents_SheetChangeEventHandler");
}
private void ThisAddIn_Shutdown(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
}
#region VSTO generated code
/// <summary>
/// Required method for Designer support - do not modify
/// the contents of this method with the code editor.
/// </summary>
private void InternalStartup()
{
this.Startup += new System.EventHandler(ThisAddIn_Startup);
this.Shutdown += new System.EventHandler(ThisAddIn_Shutdown);
}
#endregion
}
}
Stumbling Block Two
The main problem I currently have and haven't solved is that when I read the value from a cell it's either a System.String or a System.Double which is fine until I have a date value.
Using .NumberFormat is not reliable as it returns m/d/yyyy for the date '31/12/2011'
Interim Code Solution
The following is where I'm leaving this experiment as I don't want to spend more time on something that will save me less than 10 minutes a week. It's been an interesting look at how you can automate Excel but what it's made really clear is that the documentation available is poor especially around PIA.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Linq;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Threading;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using Excel = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel;
using Office = Microsoft.Office.Core;
using Microsoft.Office.Tools.Excel;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
namespace ExcelSQLFormatter
{
public partial class ThisAddIn
{
string[] letters = new string[27] { "", "A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U","V","W","X","Y","Z" };
private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
this.Application.SheetChange += new Excel.AppEvents_SheetChangeEventHandler(Application_SheetChange);
}
void Application_SheetChange(object Sh, Excel.Range Target)
{
//Stop handling events while I change
this.Application.SheetChange -= new Excel.AppEvents_SheetChangeEventHandler(Application_SheetChange);
HandleSQL(Sh, Target);
//Restore handling events
this.Application.SheetChange += new Excel.AppEvents_SheetChangeEventHandler(Application_SheetChange);
}
private void HandleSQL(object Sh, Excel.Range Target)
{
/*A SQL String to format will be passed in the following format
* {Si} String in column i
* {Ni} Number in column i
* e.g. Update Employee Set Username={S1} where EmployeeID={N2}
*/
string FindTagPattern = @"{[S|N][0-9]*}";
string FindColumnPattern = @"[0-9]";
string type;
int col;
int row;
string val;
string sql;
if (Target.Value2.GetType().ToString() == "System.String")
{
sql = (string)Target.Value2;
}
else if (Target.Value2.GetType().ToString() == "System.Double")
{
double d = Target.Value2;
sql = d.ToString();
}
else
{
sql = Target.Value2.GetType().ToString();
}
MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(sql, FindTagPattern);
foreach (Match m in matches)
{
row = Target.Row;
col = int.Parse(Regex.Match(m.Value, FindColumnPattern).Value);
type = m.Value.Substring(1, 1);
Excel.Range r = Globals.ThisAddIn.Application.get_Range(letters[col]+row.ToString(), missing);
if (r.Value2.GetType().ToString() == "System.String")
{
val = (string)r.Value2;
}
else if (r.Value2.GetType().ToString() == "System.Double")
{
double d = r.Value2;
val = d.ToString();
}
else
{
val = r.Value2.GetType().ToString();
}
if (type == "N")
{
sql = sql.Replace(m.Value, val);
}
else if (type == "S")
{
sql = sql.Replace(m.Value, "'" + val + "'");
}
}
Target.Value2 = sql;
}
private void ThisAddIn_Shutdown(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
}
#region VSTO generated code
/// <summary>
/// Required method for Designer support - do not modify
/// the contents of this method with the code editor.
/// </summary>
private void InternalStartup()
{
this.Startup += new System.EventHandler(ThisAddIn_Startup);
this.Shutdown += new System.EventHandler(ThisAddIn_Shutdown);
}
#endregion
}
}
