Invoking Excel at client side through CGI/Perl

arajani has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi Monks,

I am implementing excel processing through perl/CGI. For this purpose I need to open the excel file and extract the cell values. This is done. But there is no MS Office installed on the server side. My program takes the user inputted file (Excel) and uploads to the server, opens the excel and parses the file and writes output in different formats (text, csv etc.,). As the MS Office is not installed on the server my program became sort of useless (All the above said working fine, if the server has MS office). Now what are my options? I am looking to open and parse the Excel file at the client side. I am not sure how difficult or easy this is. Any suggestions ? How to invoke the Excel at client side, using cgi/perl (The client might not have perl modules installed) which is at the server side.

Oh .. I am using Win 2000 as the server and the client can be any of the Win m/c's

Any suggestions are welcome. IT dept is reluctant to install MS Office on server

Thanks in advance,

Raj

Comment on Invoking Excel at client side through CGI/Perl

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Invoking Excel at client side through CGI/Perl by joealba (Hermit) on May 07, 2002 at 20:10 UTC
The CPAN module Spreadsheet::ParseExcel will allow you to open and parse data from an Excel spreadsheet without installing Excel on the server. And, the docs are great! So you should have no trouble with implementation. A search on search.cpan.org also pulled up Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple, which looks pretty slick too.	[reply]
Re: Invoking Excel at client side through CGI/Perl by hopes (Friar) on May 07, 2002 at 22:48 UTC
Don't think about opening the excel file in the server side. I'm not going to say that is impossible to control the client, because there are many security holes, but I'm going to say that is not easy, and is not secure (maybe you find that your code doesn't work tomorrow) Try instaling this modules in the server (if you use ActivePerl, is very easy with ppm) `Spreadsheet-ParseExcel Spreadsheet-ParseExcel_XLHTML Spreadsheet-ParseExcel-Simple Spreadsheet-WriteExcel Spreadsheet-WriteExcel-FromDB Spreadsheet-WriteExcel-Simple` [download] I have used Spreadsheet-ParseExcel and is easy to make what you want. With the first three, you can parse xls archives. With the last three, you can write xls archives (and then you can send them to the browser) Hopes `$_=$,=q,\,@4O,,s,^$,$\,,s,s,^,b9,s, $_^=q,$\^-]!,,print` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Invoking Excel at client side through CGI/Perl by BigGuy (Friar) on May 07, 2002 at 20:40 UTC
What you are trying to do Seems like a tall order for even perl to attempt. It also seems inherently insecure to allow a webserver to run programs on a client machine. But you said the server is Win 2000 so as long as the clients are MS products also you might be able to exploit an IE bug to do it :-) But seriously I think it would be 10x simpler to let the server do the parsing of the excel file then you don't have to have perl modules on all clients. BigGuy "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitler	[reply]


Welcome to the Monastery
	PerlMonks