This is the second part of a two-part series where we explore using FlexCel.NET and Blazor. The first part was about running FlexCel in the browser, and now we will explore running it in the server.

Generating a “server-side” Blazor app

While blazor WebAssembly is the most exciting thing going on right now, we didn’t want to forget that most use cases for FlexCel are server-side. You access a database in your server, generate an Excel/PDF/HTML report with the data, and send it to the client.

So for this second part, we wanted to do something not as exciting as a WebAssembly app, but probably more useful. We won’t go into a boring “create an Excel file from a database in the server and send it to the client”, because server-side this is just FlexCel (the full FlexCel, without WebAssembly limitations), so you can use any existing FlexCel example as-is. Then you can find thousands of tutorials on the web about how to send the file you created in the server to the browser for the user to download.

What we will do now is adding an SVG chart to the existing “fetching data” example that is created when you create a new Blazor app. We will write the data into an Excel file, use the data to generate a chart, and render the chart in the client.

The video is below: