convert Excel app to web

  • Thread starter Thread starter CSharpCoder
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CSharpCoder

I have an Excel VBA app that has 25 forms within and is reading from 60
Excel Sheets for a datasource. This needs to be converted over to the web in
10 days, and it took almost 3 months to do the original one, so my question
is, is there a way (tool add on, etc) to convert this thing to the web
without a total rewrite of the application?
 
Yes, it has one main form, and then other forms that pop up when a button is
clicked. The user then enters in data into the 'child' and that is stored to
be used on the parent form.

Its doing alot of stuff its for a body shop and they wanted it web enabled.
 
unless you are using sharepoint with the excel engine (or some third
party excel library), you will probably have to code the site from
scratch. unless you are already familar with asp.net coding, it will
take longer than the excel version, and will be a different user interface.

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)
 
They want it on their intranet. It helps them calculate repair jobs
Mark Rae said:
[top-posting corrected]
Yes, it has one main form, and then other forms that pop up when a button
is clicked. The user then enters in data into the 'child' and that is
stored to be used on the parent form.
Click to expand...

Doesn't sound too bad so far...
It's doing a lot of stuff its for a body shop
Click to expand...

Like what...?
and they wanted it web enabled.
Click to expand...

Intranet, extranet or Internet...?
Click to expand...
 
I can make it into a SharePoint site, I don't think that will be an issue.
As for .NET (asp.net) I've been doing that for years, I was just seeing if
there was an easy way to convert this to a web app.
 
I've converted several Excel apps to other formats and have a pretty quick
(and dirty) way to get started. I'm assuming you will get rid of the Excel
stuff and move to a database. With SQL Server I use the import function to
bring in each sheet as a table. This usually results in a nasty looking DB
and at this point you need to consider if you can cleanup the DB or use it
as is. Clean of course is best, but structural changes will cause
significant changes to the program logic. With your time constraint likely
not a good idea for now. Throw in a few views and SP's to fill the gaps,
and then just drag tables, etc from the server explorer onto your
forms/pages. Dragging a combination of Detail and Grid views can usually
get you pretty close to where you need to be, especilly if your app is
basically a store and retrieve type.

It's an ugly approach, but you can do the basics with an app of that size in
a couple of hours. From there you should be able to estimate how much
effort would be required to finish. For the code conversion if you have
access to a good CASE tool (I like PowerDesigner) you can reverse engineer
your VBA and then change your target to C# and generate your code. This
tool also makes database cleanup pretty easy.

Worst case you can run your app under an application that serves app forms
as web pages. There is one used all the time but I'm drawing a blank on the
name (not enough coffee yet:))
 
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