Sql – Editing Autogenerated DMBL file for WCF Service

You can use a library called ExcelLibrary. It's a free, open source library posted on Google Code:

ExcelLibrary

This looks to be a port of the PHP ExcelWriter that you mentioned above. It will not write to the new .xlsx format yet, but they are working on adding that functionality in.

It's very simple, small and easy to use. Plus it has a DataSetHelper that lets you use DataSets and DataTables to easily work with Excel data.

ExcelLibrary seems to still only work for the older Excel format (.xls files), but may be adding support in the future for newer 2007/2010 formats.

You can also use EPPlus, which works only for Excel 2007/2010 format files (.xlsx files). There's also NPOI which works with both.

There are a few known bugs with each library as noted in the comments. In all, EPPlus seems to be the best choice as time goes on. It seems to be more actively updated and documented as well.

Also, as noted by @АртёмЦарионов below, EPPlus has support for Pivot Tables and ExcelLibrary may have some support (Pivot table issue in ExcelLibrary)

Here are a couple links for quick reference:
ExcelLibrary - GNU Lesser GPL
EPPlus - GNU (LGPL) - No longer maintained
EPPlus 5 - Polyform Noncommercial - Starting May 2020
NPOI - Apache License

Here some example code for ExcelLibrary:

Here is an example taking data from a database and creating a workbook from it. Note that the ExcelLibrary code is the single line at the bottom:

//Create the data set and table
DataSet ds = new DataSet("New_DataSet");
DataTable dt = new DataTable("New_DataTable");

//Set the locale for each
ds.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
dt.Locale = System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;

//Open a DB connection (in this example with OleDB)
OleDbConnection con = new OleDbConnection(dbConnectionString);
con.Open();

//Create a query and fill the data table with the data from the DB
string sql = "SELECT Whatever FROM MyDBTable;";
OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand(sql, con);
OleDbDataAdapter adptr = new OleDbDataAdapter();

adptr.SelectCommand = cmd;
adptr.Fill(dt);
con.Close();

//Add the table to the data set
ds.Tables.Add(dt);

//Here's the easy part. Create the Excel worksheet from the data set
ExcelLibrary.DataSetHelper.CreateWorkbook("MyExcelFile.xls", ds);

Creating the Excel file is as easy as that. You can also manually create Excel files, but the above functionality is what really impressed me.

You can expose the service in two different endpoints. the SOAP one can use the binding that support SOAP e.g. basicHttpBinding, the RESTful one can use the webHttpBinding. I assume your REST service will be in JSON, in that case, you need to configure the two endpoints with the following behaviour configuration

<endpointBehaviors>
  <behavior name="jsonBehavior">
    <enableWebScript/>
  </behavior>
</endpointBehaviors>

An example of endpoint configuration in your scenario is

<services>
  <service name="TestService">
    <endpoint address="soap" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="ITestService"/>
    <endpoint address="json" binding="webHttpBinding"  behaviorConfiguration="jsonBehavior" contract="ITestService"/>
  </service>
</services>

so, the service will be available at

• http://www.example.com/soap
• http://www.example.com/json

Apply [WebGet] to the operation contract to make it RESTful. e.g.

public interface ITestService
{
   [OperationContract]
   [WebGet]
   string HelloWorld(string text)
}

Note, if the REST service is not in JSON, parameters of the operations can not contain complex type.

Reply to the post for SOAP and RESTful POX(XML)

For plain old XML as return format, this is an example that would work both for SOAP and XML.

[ServiceContract(Namespace = "http://test")]
public interface ITestService
{
    [OperationContract]
    [WebGet(UriTemplate = "accounts/{id}")]
    Account[] GetAccount(string id);
}

POX behavior for REST Plain Old XML

<behavior name="poxBehavior">
  <webHttp/>
</behavior>

Endpoints

<services>
  <service name="TestService">
    <endpoint address="soap" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="ITestService"/>
    <endpoint address="xml" binding="webHttpBinding"  behaviorConfiguration="poxBehavior" contract="ITestService"/>
  </service>
</services>

Service will be available at

• http://www.example.com/soap
• http://www.example.com/xml

REST request try it in browser,

http://www.example.com/xml/accounts/A123

SOAP request client endpoint configuration for SOAP service after adding the service reference,

  <client>
    <endpoint address="http://www.example.com/soap" binding="basicHttpBinding"
      contract="ITestService" name="BasicHttpBinding_ITestService" />
  </client>

in C#

TestServiceClient client = new TestServiceClient();
client.GetAccount("A123");

Another way of doing it is to expose two different service contract and each one with specific configuration. This may generate some duplicates at code level, however at the end of the day, you want to make it working.