Hi Laurence,
We are going to be using the SmartMarker technology to allow our users to design their own spreadsheet templates.

The problem we have is the list of available values that we want to put into the spreadsheet templates is going to be quite large, and will contain a number of values that take a while to calculate.

With Aspose.Word we had the method MailMerge.GetFieldNames, we used this list to only calculate the fields that we needed for that particular template.

Is there an alternative for Aspose.Excel?

Best regards
Steve

Hi Steve,

Could you give me some more detail information about your need?

In my understanding, it will be:

1. Your users will designer their templates with smart marker technology.

2. Your users may put a lot of smart markers to a template.

3. You only want to process specific part of those smart markers and discard unused ones.

Right? If yes, you don't need to get the list of smart markers. Aspose.Excel will automatically process smart markers according your data source and discard unused markers.

---

Laurence Chen
Chief Architect
Aspose Nanjing Team
About Us
Contact Us

Hi,
You are correct in your assessment, however we aren't using a single SQL query to generate the data - the information is too high level.

For example we have the following information to put into smart markers:

revenue for the last month
revenue for the year to date
total number of orders

These are then used in formulas and charts in the spreadsheets.

Now plainly these take some time for the database server to calculate, so we only want to run the query if the smartmarker is used.

Best regards
Steve

Hi Steve,

Do you want to run queries based on smart markers?

For example, if you find smark marker "$=Product.Name" in an Excel file,  you will run query 1. If you find smark marker "$=Customer.Name" in an Excel file,  you will run query 2.  Then you can retrieve data from DB and process smart markers with those data.

Is it true?

---

Laurence Chen
Chief Architect
Aspose Nanjing Team
About Us
Contact Us

Yes, that's correct.

S.

I can add a new method in ExcelDesigner class: GetSmartMarkersList. It will return an ArrayList which contains all smart markers in an Excel file. Will it serve your need?

---

Laurence Chen
Chief Architect
Aspose Nanjing Team
About Us
Contact Us

Perfect! Many thanks!

S.

Is this solution in the latest hot fixes or will it come on the next release version?

Michael Irving

Hi Michael,

They added it in version v3.5.1

http://www.aspose.com/community/Blogs/laurence.chen/archive/2005/10/02/32822.aspx

Which was only a few days after my post - excellent service!

Best regards

Steve