Excel Format Support (Infragistics Excel Engine)

Accessing built-in styles

Styles are accessible in the Infragistics Excel Engine through the Workbook Styles property, which is a collection of WorkbookStyle instances, each one representing a cell style in the workbook.

Parent styles

The formats for styles, rows, columns, and cells are represented by the IWorksheetCellFormat interface. This interface has a new property named Style which points to the style from which cell formats resolve default properties.

Format options

The IWorksheetCellFormat interface has a FormatOptions property. This property takes a flagged enumeration values.

Excel Style mimicked behavior

There are numerous Microsoft Excel behaviors regarding styles which have been mimicked.

Determining resolved cell formats

You can determine what would really be seen in cells using the GetResolvedCellFormat methods on classes which represent a row, column, cell, and merged cell.

Styles collection

The styles collection is pre-populated with all built-in styles, which can be found in the Cell Styles gallery of the Home tab of Microsoft Excel 2007.

NormalStyle

There is a special type of style in the workbook, known as a Normal style, which can be accessed by the new Workbook.Styles.NormalStyle property, or by indexing into the collection with the name Normal .

The Normal style contains the default properties for all cells in the workbook (unless otherwise specified on a row, column, or cell). Changing properties on the Normal style will change the default cell format properties in the workbook.

The Normal style can be used when you want to change the default font for your workbook. For more information, refer to the Changing the Default Font topic.

When the parent style is set on a cell format, the format options included on the new parent style are removed from the cell format. All other properties are left intact.

When a property is set to some non-default value, the associated format options flag is added to the FormatOptions value, indicating that the cell format now provides those options.

When a new parent style is set on a cell, the format options included on the parent style are stripped out of the format options from the cell format. So if a cell format included border and fill formatting and the Total style was set as the parent style, which includes font and border formatting, the border format option on the cell format are removed and the cell format only includes fill formatting.

When a format option flag is removed from a format, all associated properties are reset to their unset values, so the cell format’s border properties are implicitly reset to default/unset values. That also means that cell format will pick up changes to the Total style’s borders in the future.

Format options on cell formats are added automatically, but not removed automatically.

When a property is set to some non-default value, the associated format option flag is added to the FormatOptions value, indicating that the cell format now provides those values.

If the property is subsequently set back to its default/unset value, the FormatOptions property will still have the associated format option flag included. It will not be removed.

Unlike Microsoft Excel, the Infragistics Excel Engine allows you to manually remove format options by modifying the FormatOptions property. Doing so will reset all properties associated with the removed options.

When a format option is added to a cell format, it stops picking up changes to all associated properties on the parent style.

Each cell format has an internal style format which initially holds no values. When the first cell format property in a group is set, the associated format option flag is added to the FormatOptions value and all properties in that group from the parent style are cached on this internal style format. It holds snapshots of the parent style’s property groups from the time when the associated format option flags were added into the cell format’s format options.

When a format option flag is removed from a cell format, the associated properties on the internal style format cache are cleared as well.

If a cell includes a format option flag and a property from the associated group has an unset value, it is resolved from the internal style format cache and not from the parent style. Only the cell format properties which do not have the associated format options flag set will resolve from the parent style

When a cell format is assigned a new parent style and that new style does not include all format options flags the old parent style included, the properties associated with the extra format options on the old parent style are still applied to the cell, but it stops picking up changes to the old parent style.

When a parent style is changed, all format options flags on the old parent style which are not on the new parent style are taken and added to the format options of the cell format.

When a format option is added to a cell format, all properties from the parent style are cached on the internal style format cache. Therefore, the cell format will implicitly cache all properties from the old parent style which are not specified on the new parent style, thereby ‘merging’ the two styles in a way.

Excel 2007 Color Model

This topic explains how to set colors on various cells format properties.

Breaking changes

This topic describes breaking changes in Infragistics Excel Engine Format support.

Understanding the Infragistics Excel Engine

This section is your gateway to important task-based information that will help you to effectively use the various features and functionalities provided by the Infragistics Excel Engine.

New Color Model

This sample demonstrates way of working with Newer color model on cell formats. You can specify the RGB color and a tint value on all color properties of a cell format. You can use linear and rectangular gradients in cells.