Working with CSV Data Sources Leave feedback

Note

This feature is only compatible with GroupDocs.Assembly for .NET 19.10 or later releases.

To access CSV data while building a report, you can pass a CsvDataSource instance to the assembler as a data source. Using of CsvDataSource enables you to work with typed values rather than just strings in template documents. Although CSV as a format does not define a way to store values of types other than strings, CsvDataSource is capable to recognize values of the following types by their string representations:

• Int32?
• Int64?
• Double?
• Boolean?
• DateTime?

Warning

For recognition of data types to work, string representations of corresponding values must be formed using invariant culture settings.

In template documents, a CsvDataSource instance should be treated in the same way as if it was a DataTable instance (see “Working with DataTable and DataView Objects” for more information) as shown in the following example.

Suppose we have CSV data like:

John Doe,30,1989-04-01 4:00:00 pm
Jane Doe,27,1992-01-31 07:00:00 am
John Smith,51,1968-03-08 1:00:00 pm

By using the template like following:

<<foreach \[in persons\]>>Name: <<\[Column1\]>>, Age: <<\[Column2\]>>, Date
of Birth: <<\[Column3\]:"dd.MM.yyyy">>
<</foreach>>
Average age: <<\[persons.Average(p => p.Column2)\]>>

The results will be produced like:

Name: John Doe, Age: 30, Date of Birth: 01.04.1989
Name: Jane Doe, Age: 27, Date of Birth: 31.01.1992
Name: John Smith, Age: 51, Date of Birth: 08.03.1968
Average age: 36

Warning

Using of the custom date-time format and the extension method involving arithmetic in the template document becomes possible, because text values of Column3 and Column2 are automatically converted to DateTime? and Int32? respectively.

By default, CsvDataSource uses column names such as “Column1”, “Column2”, and so on, as you can see from the previous example. However, CsvDataSource can be configured to read column names from the first line of CSV data as shown in the following example.

Suppose we have CSV data like:

Name,Age,Birth
John Doe,30,1989-04-01 4:00:00 pm
Jane Doe,27,1992-01-31 07:00:00 am
John Smith,51,1968-03-08 1:00:00 pm

By using the template like following:

<<foreach \[in persons\]>>Name: <<\[Name\]>>, Age: <<\[Age\]>>, Date of
Birth: <<\[Birth\]:"dd.MM.yyyy">>
<</foreach>>
Average age: <<\[persons.Average(p => p.Age)\]>>

The code should be written like:

The results will be produced like:

Name: John Doe, Age: 30, Date of Birth: 01.04.1989
Name: Jane Doe, Age: 27, Date of Birth: 31.01.1992
Name: John Smith, Age: 51, Date of Birth: 08.03.1968
Average age: 36

Also, you can use CsvDataLoadOptions to customize the following characters playing special roles while loading CSV data:

• Value separator (the default is comma)
• Single-line comment start (the default is sharp)
• Quotation mark enabling to use other special characters within a value (the default is double quotes)

• Person.csv

• Demo Template.txt