FarPoint Spread 8.0.11 31
Lili Sysyn
FarPoint Spread is a suite of Microsoft Excel-compatible spreadsheet components available for .NET, COM, and Microsoft BizTalk Server. Software developers use the components to embed Microsoft Excel-compatible spreadsheet features into their applications, such as importing and exporting Microsoft Excel files, displaying, modifying, analyzing, and visualizing data. Spread components handle spreadsheet data at the cell, row, column, or worksheet level.
This article is about the last FarPoint edition of the Spread product line. Spread is now developed by GrapeCity, Inc. Since the acquisition, Spread for Biztalk Server has been removed from the product line and SpreadJS, a JavaScript version, has been added.
FarPoint Spread for Windows Forms is a Microsoft Excel-compatible spreadsheet component for Windows Forms applications developed using Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. Developers use it to add grids and spreadsheets to their applications, and to bind them to data sources.[5] In version 4.0, new cell types were added to display barcodes and fractions, and exports for XML and PDF were added.[6][7]
FarPoint Spread 8 COM allows COM and ActiveX applications to incorporate spreadsheet features. In the 1997 book Visual Basic 5 for Windows for Dummies, Wally Wang lists an early version of Spread COM in Chapter 35: The Ten Most Useful Visual Basic Add-On Programs.[8]
Developers find it a useful tool for organizations with Microsoft BizTalk Server Enterprise Application Integration.[9] Prior to this release, BizTalk users wanting to use Excel data had to manually open the files and copy and paste data between the two applications.[10]
Please Note: As a result of prevailing industry trends, recent updates affecting Windows compatibility with ActiveX controls, and the discontinuation of support by Microsoft for legacy COM and ActiveX technologies, MESCIUS will discontinue technical support for Spread COM.
Spread COM helps you easily incorporate advanced grid and high-level spreadsheet features into your applications. It offers flexibility at the cell level for maximum control over the display and entry of the data, plenty of events to respond to user changes and an impressive feature list for everything in between; including import/export capabilities, including the ability to import and export Excel 97, 2000 and Excel 2007 files (requires the .NET Framework). It also offers enhanced printing, many cell types, formulas, a 64bit DLL and many more features. Spread COM will allow you create a spreadsheet with up to 2 billion rows by 2 billion columns.
FarPoint Spread for Windows Forms 5 is the award-winning, Microsoft Excel-compatible spreadsheet component for .NET from GrapeCity. Spread products are high performance, enterprise-strength spreadsheet components, and come battle-tested by over 100,000 registered developers worldwide.
Spread introduced a number of technologies to Microsoft developers all over the world for the very first time, including the first full-featured spreadsheet component for Visual Basic, with the first spreadsheet designer, followed by Microsoft Visual Studio .NET versions, and an array of new Excel-compatibility features and advanced customizations.
Integrating AJAX into your next application may solve many problems and give your users the interactivity and speed they are beginning to expect when looking for information on the Web. The use of AJAX in a Web Forms application provides many benefits and improvements. FarPoint recommends understanding AJAX before using it in any application development, especially in spreadsheet application development which has its own unique requirements.
FarPoint has developed leadership in the spreadsheet component marketplace with FarPoint Spread for Web Forms which is the high-end spreadsheet product for ASP.NET development. It is AJAX enabled and ATLAS tested. But they also offer a complete enterprise solution with FarPoint Spread .NET bundle which includes the Web Forms version along with a FarPoint Spread for Windows Forms version. Download the trials now to see how customizable a spreadsheet can be. FarPoint also makes a COM version of the spreadsheet control.
While users expect quick response times and numerous interactive controls from Windows applications, it is not always straight-forward to deliver these same performance aspects in Web applications. Restricted by simple browsers on the client and slowed by the limits of client-server communication, Web applications are mostly slower and simpler than their proprietary desktop counterparts. But developers are an ingenious bunch, and they have figured out how to use readily available technology on the Web to provide that same responsiveness. That available technology includes JavaScript , XML, and some underlying HTTP requests used in concert to provide asynchronous communication between the client and the server. So AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) provides a fairly simple solution that can speed up client-server communication to allow Web pages to feel more like other applications on the desktop.
As developers begin to realize the diverse ways in which Web technologies can be used for ever more data intensive front ends and applications, technologies such as AJAX will become more prevalent. Integrating AJAX into your next application may solve many problems and give your users the interactivity and speed they are beginning to expect when looking for information on the Web. The use of AJAX in a Web Forms application provides many benefits and improvements. There are also limitations to its use and not all applications benefit from it. FarPoint recommends understanding AJAX before using it in any application development, especially in spreadsheet application development which has its own unique requirements.
To see just how responsive Web pages can be using AJAX, you need look no further than Google Maps, and other sites that offer lots of data that can be manipulated with ease through an ordinary Web browser, such as having your text completed while typing here.
AJAX combines a group of technologies to provide smarter client-side pages; it is a type of programming architecture for creating interactive Web applications that can update data on a client page by making direct calls to a server without needing to go to the server for the entire page using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. By using JavaScript routines as a middleman and special HTTP requests with XML data, AJAX sends only essential data to the server and intelligently replaces data on the client without requiring an entire page of data to be retransmitted back and forth to the server. The use of AJAX is a simple mechanism with powerful results especially with large spreadsheets or grids.
The experience to the end user is dramatic because it improves response time by providing a faster postback. With AJAX, when a browser makes an initial request of a page, the server provides not only the viewable part of the page but also the AJAX routines, really JavaScript functions, that will help with further page processing. This diagram summarizes the process.
When additional user interactions are performed, the client can perform some of that processing, handling requests or changes in data with calls to the JavaScript functions. These might handle the changes locally or send abbreviated requests to the server for further processing. The server then can send back data in the form of XML for the AJAX routines to process. This eliminates the need mostly for the entire page to be posted back. With large amounts of data, as in spreadsheet applications, these time savings can be impressive. Of course, this requires more work to be done up front to anticipate the type of interactions that the user may require and how to handle those interactions. The advantage is a better experience of the Web page for the user.
Spreadsheet applications can be some of the most data intensive applications with which to work. They can work on large data sets and require many calculations. With components such as Spread for Web Forms, spreadsheet applications can bind to databases with millions of cells of data that must be made available to end users. For a Web application, traditional ways of serving up pages can impose severe restrictions on a spreadsheet application's performance when it is bound to a large data set. Paging or moving around the sheet by the end user can demand system resource typically easily available to Windows applications but limiting Web applications. But with AJAX, those restrictions can be largely hidden from the end user as AJAX can send back to the server only those cells that have changed and updating only those calculations that need recalculating. For paging, only those rows that are displayed need to be fetched from the server.
FarPoint introduced support for AJAX in its latest version of FarPoint Spread for Web Forms. With simple Boolean properties on the FpSpread component class, Spread for Web Forms can be made aware that the application is using AJAX. See the product tour at our web site or available with the product download. The example from that product tour, with a custom toolbar to allow user interactivity, is briefly described here to show how AJAX can improve a spreadsheet application.
Here the user can format the text in an ordinary text cell and see the results immediately. Also, the sum of the numbered cells can be calculated when any of the individual numbers change without having to get the entire sheet from the server.
The code for this, on the client side, consists of functions in JavaScript for each of the formatting options in the formatting toolbar. This is possible with AJAX support, which allows the Web page to avoid doing a full postback and instead calling the JavaScript functions that handle the client-side updating. AJAX allows the component to refresh without refreshing the entire page. You can add AJAX support to the FpSpread component by setting the properties described here.
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