Read CSV file selected at client side in C# through AJAX?

Question

I have a requirement in which user will select a CSV file locally, I have to read the file contents and dump them on a JQGrid. Yes, the browser is IE :)..What should I do in order to achieve this?

Answer 1

Actually you can do that with the all new HTML5 features, so if you are going for IE9+

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/file/dndfiles/

Check this out.

Basically, you need the FileReader component ( FileReader.readAsText(Blob|File, opt_encoding) ) and then just parse everything with regexps or whatever floats your goat.

If, you definetely need to do this in client side AND in older IE, maybe ActiveX is a solution:

ActiveX' FileSystemObject

Answer 2

Barring that you are not capable of using HTML 5 (lower version of ie etc.):

Javascript can't access the file system directly, so you are going to have to use the file upload tag and parse it on the server: http://webdesign.about.com/od/htmltags/p/input-file-tag.htm

You can then use AJAX to query the contents and pull it back down into the grid.

Answer 3

I would do it server side.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/9258/A-Fast-CSV-Reader

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.fileupload.aspx

(FileUploadControl.OpenFile)