Can a C# web service access an Excel Services workbook?

Question

A bit of background: I have an InfoPath browser form that I have connected to a C# web service that I've written. I have an Excel Services worksheet published in SharePoint as well.

What I'd like to do is have the web service open up the Excel file, do it's job, and save the file under a different name in SharePoint. I'd like to do this because the Excel worksheet that is uploaded now is basically a blank template; so it's just kind of a resource to be used by the web service.

Can this be done? Thank you in advance for any tips you can give me!

Answer 1

You would be able to use the Excel Web Services to connect to the workbook and get data from the sheets. Here is the MSDN documentation and here is an example of using the REST based API. All you would have to do is use something like WebClient and NetworkCredential to get and post data to the service. Oh, there is also this blog post that is a great quick start guide.

Answer 2

Yes your web service can use the Open XML SDK 2.0 see Generating Excel 2010 Workbooks by Using the Open XML SDK 2.0 which uses the file system to read from and save to, but you can use the SharePoint object model to read from and write to SharePoint instead