Dirty little bug in OWC11 Spreadsheet

[Josh Sale]

I've identified this bug previously in this newsgroup, however it now
appears that somebody from MS is participating, so I'm going to describe it
again.

When an OWC11 spreadsheet component is executed on an IE client, the Dirty
property is set to True anytime a cell in the spreadsheet is selected with
the mouse. Just click a cell and the spreadsheet is now considered dirty.


Alvin provided a link to report the bug to MS. I did that. The response I
got back was:

Hello Josh,

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Customer Service. Please accept my
sincere apologies for the delay in response.

I appreciate that you have taken the time to bring this to our attention! I
have forwarded your bug report to the appropriate development team here for
their analysis.

Due to the complexity of Office Web Components issues, they fall outside the
bounds of your Personal Warranty for Office 2003. If you would like
technical support for this issue, please utilize our Professional Support
Services, which for your convenience I have outlined below:

No-charge online support resources include:

- The Knowledge Base, which includes over 250,000 articles covering a
variety of issues, including all known bugs
(http://support.microsoft.com/search/)
- Community newsgroups where you can post a question for other users
(http://support.microsoft.com/newsgroups/)
- TechNet, which includes extensive resources for advanced technical issues,
such as servers and networking (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/)

For assisted support, you may:

- Submit an online incident by visiting
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=sz;en-us;offer Currently,
online support is available for a discounted rate of $99 per incident.
- Call 800-936-4900 to speak with a Support Professional, 24 hours a day.
Telephone support is $245 per incident.

Josh, thanks again for your feedback! I hope these resources are helpful. At
this time, I will be archiving your support request. If you have any
questions concerning your support options, please reply and let us know.

Thank you,

Elizabeth
Microsoft Online Customer Service


Perhaps Thao (or some other Microsofty) can do something with this?

josh

 

[Thao Moua [ms]]

This is a known issue. The property ALWAYS return True

What are you trying to accomplish with the Dirty property

Thao Mou
OWC Chartspace Suppor

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and
confers no rights. Use of included script samples are
subject to the terms specified at
http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.ht

----- Josh Sale wrote: ----

I've identified this bug previously in this newsgroup, however it no
appears that somebody from MS is participating, so I'm going to describe i
again

When an OWC11 spreadsheet component is executed on an IE client, the Dirt
property is set to True anytime a cell in the spreadsheet is selected wit
the mouse. Just click a cell and the spreadsheet is now considered dirty


Alvin provided a link to report the bug to MS. I did that. The response
got back was

Hello Josh

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Customer Service. Please accept m
sincere apologies for the delay in response

I appreciate that you have taken the time to bring this to our attention!
have forwarded your bug report to the appropriate development team here fo
their analysis

Due to the complexity of Office Web Components issues, they fall outside th
bounds of your Personal Warranty for Office 2003. If you would lik
technical support for this issue, please utilize our Professional Suppor
Services, which for your convenience I have outlined below

No-charge online support resources include

- The Knowledge Base, which includes over 250,000 articles covering
variety of issues, including all known bug
(http://support.microsoft.com/search/
- Community newsgroups where you can post a question for other user
(http://support.microsoft.com/newsgroups/
- TechNet, which includes extensive resources for advanced technical issues
such as servers and networking (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/

For assisted support, you may

- Submit an online incident by visitin
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=sz;en-us;offer Currently
online support is available for a discounted rate of $99 per incident
- Call 800-936-4900 to speak with a Support Professional, 24 hours a day
Telephone support is $245 per incident

Josh, thanks again for your feedback! I hope these resources are helpful. A
this time, I will be archiving your support request. If you have an
questions concerning your support options, please reply and let us know

Thank you

Elizabet
Microsoft Online Customer Servic


Perhaps Thao (or some other Microsofty) can do something with this

jos

 

[Josh Sale]

Hmmm ... I couldn't find any reference to the problem in the Knowledgebase.
Can you point me to an article?

I wouldn't say the property always returns True. I initialize it to False
in the web page's onload event handler. If the user does NOTHING to the
spreadsheet, then its still False when I'm ready to post to the page back to
the server.


I have a commercial application that lets users analyze financial data. The
primary interface is via Excel. But for customers who want a light
footprint, we offer a web interface. Currently we're using a grid from
Infragistics. But its slow, is missing key features (freeze row and column
headings while scrolling data) and doesn't provide compatible cell
formatting with our Excel version.

So when we saw OWC we got real excited.

Our ASP.Net application uses OWC on the server to populate a formatted
workbook full of data and then we ship the XML to a client version of the
OWC spreadsheet. When the user clicks one of the toolbar buttons, the
jscript on the client determines what to post back to the server. If the
user hasn't actually updated the data, then we don't have to send back very
much. If the user has updated the spreadsheet (i.e., entered new data
values) then we send back the XML version of the client spreadsheet to the
server for processing (e.g., evenutally updating a database).

So having a correctly maintained Dirty property reduces the work on the
client, the network traffic and the amount of processing needing to be done
on the server. It would be really good if it was correctly maintained.


As long as I have your attention, I'd like to make a couple of other
comments about the OWC spreadsheet object model:

- It would be nice if the Selection and RangeSelection properties supported
..Areas.Count. Even if Selection.Areas.Count always returned 1 (since the
user is limited to a single selection on the spreadsheet), this would make
the OWC spreadsheet more compatible with existing Excel code.

- It would be nice if OWC supported Range.SpecialCells(xlCellTypeFormulas,
xlErrors). When processing the contents of the spreadsheet its nice to have
an efficient way of finding all of the cells that contain bad data. Without
this, our code has to examine every used cell in the spreadsheet ... slow!

- Our Excel code makes extensive use of Range.PasteSpecial xlPasteFormats,
xlPasteSpecialOperationNone. Since OWC doesn't support this method, we have
to set many, many individual properties.

So the general comment is to try to maintain compatibility with Excel's
object model as much as possible.

BTW, I don't want to sound to negative! We love the OWC spreadsheet ... we
think of it as Excel's baby brother!

Thanks for you interest.

josh