Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
It is designed to be run on a page inside a browser as part of a solution where the user is interact-
ing with the core Excel Services UI. It provides events which make it possible for you can program-
matically react to things that the user does. For instance, when doing some simple data validation, if a
user types in a value that is below 100 in cell A1, you might want to show a pop-up message box with
the message, “The value is too low. Enter a value greater than 100.” The events that indicate that a cell
is being edited or that a value of a cell have changed are fired by Excel Services and your solution can
take action on them.
There are also events with which you can determine which cells have been selected. This makes
it possible to navigate the Excel Services UI to a different location in the workbook or even have a
second window on the page that shows Excel Services UI based on the selection. Solutions with VBA
buttons on the first Excel sheet are fairly common. When the user clicks a button on the first sheet,
she might be navigated to the correct part of the report. Unfortunately, such solutions don't work on
Excel Services, because VBA isn't supported. But, by using the JSOM, such solutions are possible on a
webpage.
excel Services reST
REST is commonly used to retrieve an XML description of a webpage by using only the URL to the
webpage. For Excel Services, this means that given a URL to a workbook file, you can access the entire
file or parts of the file from anything that knows how to traverse a URL and bring back content.
This is a powerful concept because it makes it possible for users to build effective solutions without
actually writing any code. The “code” in this case is just a carefully crafted URL. The URL specifies the
path to the workbook, specifies that REST is being used, specifies any values that should be set into
certain cells in a workbook, and then specifies what object or values should be retrieved.
REST supports retrieving many types of objects from a workbook (charts, cell values, tables, and so
on) and gives you the option to specify what format they should be in (atom, HTML, or an image).
Using REST, it is super simple to embed a chart or table of data based on Excel logic into a blog,
webpage, or any other application that can traverse a URL. And, the file itself isn't embedded. The file
remains safely stored in SharePoint; Excel Services loads the file, recalculates it to get the latest num-
bers, and returns only the result to be embedded in the webpage. So, as the file updates, the blog or
page gets the latest numbers/image as the page is reloaded.
REST is also a great way to quickly and easily retrieve data from the workbook in atom format for
further processing as part of a more advanced solution.
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